Let's turn back the clock a few tens of thousands of years to the last Ice Age, where the planet was a whole lot more brrr than it is today. Honestly, we were a hardy bunch back then, people that is, and a question mark hangs over whether moderns would be quite so successful today if we were plonked in the same situation, softened as we are by the host of modern comforts we've become accustomed to. Take away hot running water, heaters, A/C, cars, and the internet; reckon we'd survive 5 minutes in the Ice Age trying to stay warm, find food, and dodge saber tooth tigers?
Maybe, yes, if the distant past was anything like it is in Tundra's Fortune, an online slot from provider Pragmatic Play. In this world, humans and dangerous animals appear to be buddies, the weather is not too bad, even when it's snowing, and life looks neatly simple. With a vibe similar to that found in Blue Sky Studios' film Ice Age, players enter a world pre-industrialisation of mountains, trees, and tundra. There, they are joined by a cheerful human and later a cheerful tiger standing on either side of a game grid, and all seems cheerfully low-key, at first.
>Back to the grid, it's got 6 columns of 4 symbols, each laid out in a non-flush manner like a honeycomb. With 84 hexagonal ways to win, wins are awarded for landing left-to-right adjacent matching symbols connected on at least one side. Running highly volatile, Tundra's Fortune powers out a default RTP of 96.04% when betting 20 p/c to $/€240 per spin or 96.06% when using the Ante Bet. When the Ante Bet is activated, the stake increases by 25%, upping the chance of triggering free spins.
The majority of Tundra's Fortune's symbols are its regular pays, of which there are 11 of them. They consist of 9 to A card ranks as the lows and a dinosaur, a moose, a wolf, a saber tooth tiger, and a woolly mammoth as the highs. Hitting a 6 OAK low pay combo pays out 2.5 to 3.75 times the bet, while the same result with high pays awards 5 to 7.5 times the bet. Wilds are instrumental in providing Tundra's Fortune's best moments, but mainly in free spins where they get multipliers. Otherwise, what wilds do is substitute for any regular pay symbol and land on reels 2 to 6.
>Nothing extra occurs in the base game, so let's jump straight to the free spins round, triggered when at least 3 scatter symbols hit. Landing 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatters awards 8, 15, 20, or 40 free spins plus a payout of 1x, 5x, 50x, or 500x the bet, respectively.
During free spins, all wilds have a multiplier of x2, x3, x4, or x5. Multipliers apply to all wins that contain a wild. If there is more than 1 wild in the same winning combination, their multipliers multiply each other. Hitting 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols in the round awards an extra 5, 8, 15, 20, or 40 free spins, respectively, to keep it going.
>Life back in the Ice Age was presumably simpler than it is now (in some ways) - find food, find shelter, survive, and this distillation of needs to focus on is reflected in Tundra's Fortune. This isn't a game overpowering players with a confusing screed of rules, nor does it have a lot of features going on either. Nothing really spices up the main game, and just one or two tweaks occur to the bonus round. Easy. In saying that, while life might have been simpler back then, it was tough, and a tough simplicity can be experienced while playing Tundra's Fortune. It's certainly not all kicking back and taking it easy.
For starters, its base game's got nothing supplementary to be on the lookout for. Just hexagonal wins and that's about it. There's the ante bet for players who want to hurry things along, but Tundra's Fortune is a game which might have benefitted from a bonus buy. It's strange there isn't one, really. The reason for wanting to speed the process of triggering free spins up is not just because Tundra's Fortune adds multipliers to wilds in free spins, but its 12,500x the bet win cap is rather high. No doubt this figure is helped along by the fact wild multipliers multiply each other when used in the same win. Since this is only possible in free spins, it makes working through the base game akin to waiting for an Ice Age to end to feel a bit of warmth again.
Once in the free spins bonus round, naturally, you can't expect the game will always step up, but such is the power of multiplying multipliers that they don't need a vast number of them to pull off something special. And no doubt, the thrill of scoring some big multiplied win is what many/most players taking on Tundra's Fortune will be chasing in what is a spirited Ice Age-themed game, one which came across as very all-or-nothing due to how much is funnelled into one feature in one specific phase of play.
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