It seems like a lot of people out there appreciate a good heist (from a safe distance), as attested by all the movies, books, and online slots consistently being released. Software provider Pragmatic Play appears to favour the theme, too, as the topic of crime has appeared in the studio's past work already. Well, it's time to add another one to the swag bag. Titled Robber Strike, it boasts several intriguing features, though, by the time you're done reading about them, you might think they've been nicked from elsewhere.
On with the show, and if you ever see a masked man holding a bulging bag with a dollar sign imprint over his shoulder, there's a good chance he's up to no good. One of these bandit types greets players on Robber Strike's home page, and in the game proper, he appears on the wild symbols. With a pretty sweet bongo-driven soundtrack jammin' in the background (it gets livelier when the reels are spinning), Robber Strike is located in a swanky banking spot, the kind of place that caters to high net-worth individuals rather than any old stiff off the street. Behind the gaming grid sits a vault door, and when triggering free spins, players enter it to mingle with stacks of gold coins and bundles of banknotes.
On to the game grid, where Robber Strike's has 6 reels holding 4 symbols each, providing 4,096 ways to win. Wins are awarded for landing matching symbols left to right from the first reel and on. Volatility is high in this game of smash and grab, with a 96.51% maximum theoretical return to player, or 96.5% when buying free spins. The stake selection begins at 10 p/c, rising to $/€100 for the high rolling heisters out there, while buying the bonus round has a cost of 100 times the bet.
All pay symbols award wins for 3 to 6-of-a-kind winning ways, and 10 different pay symbols grace the table. The first five are low-pay 10-A card royals, worth 0.4 to 0.8 times the stake for a 6 symbol win, whereas a 6 premium symbol win awards 2 to 50 times the bet. The high-pay symbols are bank notes, a crown, a dog, a copper, and a big boss-type character. Robber Strike's wilds are a bit special. They appear on all but the leftmost reel, replacing any regular pay symbol. When a wild hits in the base game, a chance exists it will randomly expand to cover all positions on a reel, and when it expands, it has a random multiplier of x2 to x10, which applies to all winning combinations it is part of.
No other features appear in the base game, but like a guard posted outside a vault, be on the lookout for Robber Strike's scatter symbols. Landing 3 or more scatter symbols triggers the bonus round. Furthermore, if triggered by 4, 5, or 6 scatters, players also collect 20x, 200x, or 2,000x the bet, respectively. When triggered, players choose Free Spins with Expanding Wilds or Free Spins with Sticky Wilds.
10 free spins come with this feature. During it, whenever a wild hits on reels 3 or 4, it expands to cover the entire reel, and a respins session is triggered. The game keeps respinning, awarding wins after each respins until no new win hits. Each time a respin occurs, the multiplier increases by +1 on the expanded wild, which applies to all wins that it is part of. If, during respins, 2 expanded wilds are present at the same time, their multipliers are multiplied before awarding the win. Landing 3 or more scatters retriggers the round without limit.
8 free spins are awarded with this feature. Before the round begins, a random symbol is picked. Whenever picked symbols land on reels 2, 3, 4, or 5, they transform into wilds. All wild symbols landing in this bonus, either naturally or from a symbol transformation, will remain on the reels until the round ends. When filling one or more reels on the same spin with sticky wilds, +3 more free spins are awarded.
When buying the bonus round for 100 times the bet, 3 to 6 scatters will land to trigger the feature. Then, players are able to pick their preferred feature of the two options.
We used the word nicked in the intro, but even if the features here exactly weren't straight lifted from elsewhere, they did ring bells as if they have been used before. In one form or another, at least. No big surprise why these sorts of features are popular either, because Robber Strike does some pretty sweet stuff with expanding wild symbols. Maybe inspired by games like Beast Mode, Danger High Voltage, or some of the expanding wild features Hacksaw Gaming has been tinkering with recently. Pragmatic Play itself is no stranger to expanding/spreading wild action; see games like Wild West Duels, Excalibur Unleashed, or Power of Thor Megaways, amongst others, as examples. The point is expanding wilds are hot and can get better (potentially) with a juicy multiplier tossed in there, too.
Robber Strike ups the ante further since when more than one wild multiplier is in play on a respin, the values multiply each other, providing the chance for spicy heisting to occur. Factor in the 4,096 ways to win pay system, decent symbol values, and who knows, lucky armchair robbers might just crack the vault. At 5,000x the bet, Robber Strike's win cap is a decent enough target to aim for, all things considered. It could have been bigger, perhaps, but it at least feels achievable given what players have to work with.
Perhaps one of Robber Strike's criticisms is that the theme use is a little bit on the unoriginally unexciting side. Pragmatic Play itself has used this kind of thing more than once in the past; Reel Banks, The Great Stick Up, and Cash Patrol sprang to mind as distant relations of one sort or another. No biggie, and while Robber Strike doesn't strike one as a Pragmatic Play flagship release (do they do those anymore?), it's got the sort of features that can pull off a good pilfering when they're doing their expanding and multiplying thing.
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