While billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson each pursue their own unique approach to space travel, Hacksaw Gaming has discreetly entered the fray with its own vision of the final frontier. The slot machine Rocket Reels is a new addition to the Pocketz Series, and it features a space theme. These mobile-centric products are charming to look at, and they include substantial winning potentials; nonetheless, they are controlled by mathematical models that rarely correspond to their pleasant demeanor. Rocket Reels has it all, including cluster payouts, responses, multiplier rockets, UFOs that shoot forth symbols, and free games.
If you’re playing Rocket Reels on a mobile device, you’ll want to rotate it into landscape position to get the full experience, since the 7×7 grid takes up almost the whole screen in portrait mode. If you view it in landscape mode or full screen on your desktop, you’ll see a purple planet with strange floating rocks and a starry night sky. The upbeat music, which ranges from trance to children’s cartoons, helps to create the impression that this world is completely safe for exploration. It’s hardly the kind of music you’d expect to hear while evil aliens hunt humanity.
You may play Rocket Reels on whatever device you choose, with wagers ranging from 20 pence to £/€100. When playing in standard mode, the theoretical return value is 96.3%, and when purchasing the free spins bonus game, it rises to 96.34%. Although several multipliers do show up in the game, not all of them link up with clusters. When they do, however, it may be quite a thrill because of the tremendous volatility.
Cluster wins occur when at least five identical symbols land next to one other in either the vertical or horizontal directions. There are a total of ten normal pay symbols found in the game, with half of them being rocks of varying hues and the other half being colorful planets or asteroid symbols. When made up of premium symbols, clusters of 15 or more matching symbols are worth 150 to 300 times the bet. Wild symbols, which may occur anywhere and replace other symbols to create a winning combination, are also present.
Rocket Reels: Slot Functions
Although cascades, multipliers, and free spins all seem fairly conventional, Rocket Reels does something very cool with them that makes them stand out and can lead to some really great outcomes. To begin, anytime a winning cluster appears on the grid, it is immediately erased to create room for new symbols. This process of dropping symbols continues until no new winning clusters can be formed. During a cascade, any multipliers that appear on the reels will stay put until the sequence ends.
There are three distinct rocket emblems that might appear on any reel. If three or more rockets are visible, the game will fire them after any cascades have concluded in the main game. When triggered, the rocket icons in the upper left corner of the grid shoot out into the sky. All symbols they go through are erased and replaced with multipliers. After this, new icons replace the ones that were knocked out by the multipliers, and a fresh round of wins may be calculated. Any clump that has a multiplier layered on top of it will have its value increased by that multiplier. Multiple multipliers in a winning cluster will have their combined values used. These are the potential values for the three rockets:
First Stage Rocket: 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5x Multipliers.
Multipliers of 10, 15, and 20 on the Rocket 2 engine.
Rocket 3 has 25x, 50x, and 75x enhancements.
The occasional rocket launch will coincide with the appearance of an unidentified flying object. When one appears, it floats over the board and collects anything from 20 to all of the symbols. After that, fresh icons start appearing. Extraterrestrial craft make an appearance either in the main game or in a bonus game.
Free games of 8 are awarded when 3 spacemen appear. Even if there are less than three rocket symbols in visible during a free spin, the bonus round will still begin.
Finally, the cost of purchasing the additional features is 129 times the wager. Free games are triggered when 3 spacemen symbols appear during the spin.
Judgment on the Space Rocket Slots
The aforementioned three millionaires are all venturing into space for different reasons. Elon Musk seems to be aiming for the cyborg driven future angle, while Jeff Bezos dreams of a trillion humans trailing out over the stars in colonies, and Richard Branson seems more concerned with the tourist dollar through his business Neuralink, which can implant chips into human brains.
In contrast, Rocket Reels doesn’t try too hard. Rocket Reels is quite formulaic, but in a comfortingly familiar sense rather than a bad one. You get the impression that Hacksaw Gaming’s designers have come up with dozens of ideas for games like this and are keeping them on standby, ready to be developed into whole products at a moment’s notice. These are the reaction-based slots that pay out in clusters and make creative use of multipliers. Rocket Reels fits in well with other similar services, such as Xpander, Hop’n’Pop, and Toshi Video Club.
Rocket Reels’ multipliers are just as hit-or-miss as those in other games. It’s incredible how many of these the rockets produce, just to have them go to waste since nothing landed to use them. The good news is that x10-x25’s are more common than you might expect and occasionally link with a cluster, despite the fact that there is a lot of teasing. But as we’ve seen in other Hacksaw games, a couple of lucky spins may completely transform your luck, and the maximum payout in Rocket Reels is 10,000 times your initial wager.
In conclusion, Rocket Reels is another very enjoyable slot from the Hacksaw team, with its effective use of mixture, clustering, tumbling, and multipliers. It’s hardly ground-breaking, but it offers all the features necessary to keep gamers who want something easy to learn and use entertained.