Rock Vegas, an online slot by Pragmatic Play and compadres Reel Kingdom, is a play on words combining the activities of gambling - the Vegas part, and a fictional stone age setting, hence the Rock bit. Gambling is a human activity that is said to stretch back to at least 2,300 BCE, where tiles uncovered in Ancient China were presumably used for games of chance. It makes you wonder, what about prehistory? Did cavepeople wager those bone necklaces they wear in cartoons? Perhaps mammoth racing was hot? The sad thing is we'll probably never know. But we can speculate, which is what Pragmatic Play & Co has done in Rock Vegas.
Set in a steamy prehistoric jungle, Rock Vegas is played on two very different reel sets. The first one appears in the base game, made up of 5 reels, 3 rows, and 20 fixed paylines. Rock Vegas alternates between comedy and seriousness, the former provided by a friendly-looking caveman chilling on the side of the screen Gonzo-style, the latter from a bunch of wild beasts on the reels. There's a bit of an Ice Age vibe from the cranky looking woolly mammoth and a sabre tooth white tiger, who might be friendly, or who might well launch into attack mode at any moment. Best to tread carefully.
>
>
Available on any device, Rock Vegas provides stakes of 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin. As per usual, RTP is variable, though players can check the settings by visiting the paytable, where the most generous figure is 96.6%. The volatility, rated as 5 out 5, is high, as is potential, where the 10,000x max win is achievable during a separate hold & win bonus game that can be quite eventful.
In the base game, matching symbols pay left to right on adjacent reels, beginning on the left-hand side. Nine regular paying symbols have been used; five are low pay 10-A royals worth 3.75 to 6.25 times your stake for five of a kind, while high pays are officially called crazy beasts, lizards, white tigers, and cavemen. The reward for landing a five symbol line of high pays is 12.5 to 37.5 times the bet. Lastly, Rock Vegas might bill itself as a 'wild slot', but no actual wild symbols make it into the game at any point.
With no wilds, modifiers, or extras in the base game, the focus is on triggering Rock Vegas' Hold & Spin feature. This is done when at least 3 scatter symbols are in view. When this happens, the base game reels disappear and are replaced by a new 10x10 grid containing only coloured rock symbols or blank spaces. Each rock has its own value, so the blue, green, yellow, pink, and red rocks are worth 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 1x the bet, respectively.
The types of rocks that appear on the grid are also dependent on how many scatter symbols triggered the bonus. If 3 scatter symbols triggered it, all rocks appear; if it was 4 scatter symbols, then blue rocks are removed. If it was 5 scatter symbols, then blue and green rocks are removed.
The bonus round begins with 3 respins where all rocks that hit remain locked in place and reset the number of respins back to 3. The action continues until respins countdown to zero, or the screen is filled with rocks.
When clusters of 2x2 or 3x3 matching rock symbols are created, they merge to create a large rock, and a random multiplier is added to them. For groups of 2x2, this could be x5 or x10, while clusters of 3x3 get multipliers of x35 to x500.
There's more. Rock symbols may land with little key icons on top of them, which are collected on a trail beside the grid. At set intervals, keys unlock chests to award:
If you make it to the end of the trail, the Mystery Multiplier generates a random number between x2 and x100 which is collected to multiply the general multiplier. When the trail is finished, the feature restarts.
>
>
Reel Kingdom and, by extension, Pragmatic Play hit just the right formula for success with their Big Bass Bonanza range of slots, and there is a similar air to Rock Vegas. It has the same sort of cartoon-realistic look to it, the fisherman replaced by a caveman and the fish for prehistoric animals. Like the Bass games, Rock Vegas looks big, gaudy, and brash while being filled with equally big, gaudy, and brash effects. It's a real slot of two halves, dividing its time between a fairly dry base game and a bonus round where the fireworks get a chance to pop.
In that way, Rock Vegas is much like the Bass games, as pretty much nothing happens in the main game aside from random line wins. It's not until the bonus game strikes that the action starts to heat up. While not exactly making it to the streak respin big leagues, Rock Vegas' Hold & Spin has the potential to get pretty mega. At least, when matching symbols are clustering up and pulling in boosters from either the cluster multiplier or the Mystery Multiplier, or both. Max win tops out at a sturdy 10,000x the bet, and the probability of hitting it is relatively low too, all things considered, adding an additional layer of tantalisation.
Rock Vegas is by no means assured of the same level of success as the fishing games, but it wouldn't be a major surprise. The game has the same flashy pizzaz, instant prize wins, and collection dynamics as its bass-based forebears, which may strike the right chord with a significant number of players.
Play for real money
