Do you have the guts to ride Reel Kingdom’s Cash Elevator slot machine to the 13th floor? Daring because they’ve used a unique plot point to color the story. The two primary elements are a Hold-and-Spin game and a round of free spins, neither of which are very risky. In contrast, Cash Elevator has a novel idea of ascending/descending reels, which eliminates more symbols from the reels as you progress upward. Reach the pinnacle to activate bonus features and increase your chances of winning.
If you’ve played Book of Gems Megaways, you may have noticed that the main character is a spitting image of Tom Hardy. Reel Kingdom does the same approach in Cash Elevator, but with a curvy leading lady who resembles an Angelina Jolie in Steampunk gear. You decide if this is just a happy coincidence or not. During one of the features, she is accompanied by a bellboy with exceptionally prominent cheekbones who transforms into a zombie. This furthers the game’s notion of a dead lover, albeit zombies with their brains eaten and skin peeling off their sick bodies aren’t nearly as attractive as pale, brooding vampires, so the success of this trend remains to be seen.
Using the Pragmatic Play engine, the game is played out in a 5-reel, 3-row grid with 20 fixed paylines. This happens if three or more identical symbols fall in a row, beginning with the first one. Any machine accepting wagers between 20 pence and £/€100 per spin will do for this elevator journey. This is not a sleek, state-of-the-art elevator, but rather the sort of rusty, iron-barred gizmo you would see in a charming old pension or hotel in a foreign country. This was a roundabout way of explaining that the mathematical model behind Cash Elevator is extremely risky, with an expected loss-adjusted return of 96.64 percent.
Low-paying 9-A tiles have ornate royal insignia, while high-paying ones feature items like trunks, cars, keys, vintage phones, pocket watches, nocturnal felines, and logs. When landing in lines of five of a type, these latter image symbols provide payouts of 5x to 50x the wager. Let’s take a look at the two wilds and see how they work in free games.
Money Machine: Slot Machine Benefits
The Cash Elevator function will be discussed first, as it is always available in the main game. The game is meant to symbolize an elevator in a 14-story skyscraper with a basement. At the beginning of the game, all of the pay symbols from the paytable will be shown on reels 1 and 2. Starting on the second level, the lowest value symbol is always eliminated. The cat tile, for instance, has the lowest value of any symbol on the 12th floor.
There are two methods for changing levels. When the lowest-valued symbol on a certain floor contributes to a winning combination, the game advances to the next level. Reel 3 is a possible landing place for arrow symbols. The game advances 1-3 levels in the direction the joystick is pointed when this occurs. Obviously, your current progress will be lost if you change bet levels before reaching level 1. The elevator will be sent to any level between 1 and 12 at random if it reaches the basement.
The Dead Lovers Free Games bonus round follows this and is activated by a full 1×3 wild appearing on reels 2 or 4. Choose from one of three pre-round options to receive between six and twelve extra spins. If two wilds activate the feature, the number of free games is increased from 12 to 24.
At the beginning of each round, the action shifts to a different floor, anywhere from 1 to 12. Wilds that cover an entire reel start off on the outside of the screen and migrate inward as the round progresses. When they’re even, the bellhop transforms into a zombie and you get five more spins.
The Hold-and-Spin bonus is unlocked on the game’s 13th level. Special symbols or blank spaces are the only allowed options on a fresh board. Once the grid is full or all the new symbols have been used, the game is over. Depending on your current floor, the symbols you draw may be worth more or less money, or they may act as multipliers that increase your round’s victory by as much as ten times. When the round is over, you’ll be assigned a new floor number between 1 and 12.
Slots Win Big for the Bankroll
It’s surprising how creative Cash Elevator is for a Reel Kingdom slot. Cash Elevator is an unusual rip-off, as we are more used to seeing games like Fruit Machine, ‘Book’ Games, Irish, and Fishin’ Frenzy. There aren’t many Love in an Elevator moments with zombies and Angelina Jolie, much alone a zombie that moonlights as a bellhop.
The big picture concept is fantastic, but unfortunately the implementation falls short. There’s a touch of a ‘well that’s good enough’ attitude that drags Cash Elevator down. When the action shifts to the basement, small problems like the jerky two-movement animation and the birds’ inability to move or perch on anything stand out. Even while no studio is flawless and they are only small issues, they nevertheless add up to a less than ideal experience. As do the jumbled visuals, which sometimes use photorealism or brief video footage of characters racing along corridors and other times have more traditional hand-drawn graphics. It’s like seeing a hybrid live-action/CGI film like Hop or Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Cash Elevator’s maximum payout is one feature that might bring it back into the limelight. The 5,100x return on investment was almost as shocking as the underlying premise. Who knows how plausible it is. You’ll need a lot of heartfelt retriggers during the free spins bonus to come even close to that number, since the Hold-and-Win feature doesn’t seem to be optimized for huge winnings.
At least philosophically, it’s refreshing to see Reel Kingdom take some risks. Cash Elevator’s impact may have been greater if they had smoothed out the remainder of the game, but it’s still an improvement.