Rock Vegas Slot Machine Review
Rock Vegas, an online slot by Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom, the name of the game is a combination of words that combines gambling activities in Vegas, with a stone age background, Hence the name Rock. Gambling is a human activity that is said to date back as long as 2,300 BC, since games like Mahjong invented in Ancient China were used for betting games. It makes you wonder, what about prehistoric humans? Do cavemen risk the bone necklaces they wear like in the cartoons? Maybe mammoth racing is a gambling game for them? The sad thing is we may never know. But we can speculate, as Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom did in Rock Vegas.
Set in a steamy prehistoric jungle, Rock Vegas is played on two very different sets of reels. The first to appear in the main game, which consists of 5 reels, 3 rows and 20 fixed paylines. Rock Vegas alternates between comedy and seriousness, the former provided by friendly-looking cavemen lounging on the side of the screen Gonzo-style, the latter of a bunch of beasts on the reels. There’s a bit of an Ice Age vibe to the cranky-looking woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed white tiger, who might be friendly, or who might launch an attack mode at any moment. Best to tread with caution.
Available on any device, Rock Vegas provides bets of 20 coins to 100 per spin. As usual, RTP varies, although players can check the settings by visiting the payout table, where the cheapest figure is 96.6%. Volatility, rated as 5 out of 5, is high, as is the potential, where a max win of 10,000x can be achieved during separate hold & win bonus games which can be very important.
In the base game, matching symbols pay from left to right on adjacent reels, starting on the left side. Nine regular paying symbols have been used; five are 10-A low-paid royals worth 3.75 to 6.25 times your bet for five of a kind, while high-paying are officially called mad beasts, lizards, white tigers, and cavemen. The prize for landing five high paying line symbols is 12.5 to 37.5 times the stake. Lastly, Rock Vegas may refer to itself as a ‘slot wild’, but neither wild symbol actually makes its way into the game at any point.
Features of Rock Vegas Mega Hold & Spin Slots
With no wild symbols, modifiers, or extra bonus symbols in the game, your focus is on triggering Rock Vegas’s Hold & Spin feature. This is done when at least 3 scatter symbols are visible. When this happens, the base game reel disappears and is replaced by a 10×10 board containing only colored stone symbols or empty spaces. Each stone has its own value, so blue, green, yellow, pink, and red stones are worth 0.1, 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, and 1x stake, respectively.
The type of stone that appears on the grid also depends on how many scatter symbols trigger the bonus. If 3 scatter symbols trigger it, all stones appear; if it is 4 scatter symbols, then the blue stone is removed. If it’s 5 scatter symbols, then the blue and green stones are removed.
The bonus round begins with 3 respins in which all affected stones remain locked in place and resets the respin count back to 3. The action continues until the respin countdown to zero, or the screen is filled with stones.
When groups of matching 2×2 or 3×3 rock symbols are created, they combine to make a large rock, and a random multiplier is added to it. For a 2×2 group, this can be x5 or x10, while a 3×3 group gets a multiplier from x35 to x500.
There are more. The stone symbol may land with a small lock icon on it, which is collected in a path next to the grid. At set intervals, keys open chests to give:
- A random multiplier of up to x500 is added to any of the stones.
- Cash prizes up to 500x stake.
- 4 to 10 keys are added to the trail.
- A random general multiplier of up to x100 is added to the total winnings at the end of the bonus round.
- One trigger.
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 common multiplier. When the trace is complete, the feature restarts.
Conclusion
Reel Kingdom and, by extension, Pragmatic Play hit the right formula for success with their various Big Bass Bonanza slots, and there’s an atmosphere similar to Rock Vegas. It has the same cartoon-realistic look, fishermen being replaced by cavemen and fish for prehistoric animals. Like the Bass games, Rock Vegas looks big, flashy, and brash when filled with equally big, flashy, and brash effects. This is a real slot of two parts, dividing its time between a fairly dry base game and a bonus round where the fireworks get a chance to go off.
In that way, Rock Vegas is very similar to a game of Bass, as almost nothing happens in the main game apart from random line wins. It’s not until the bonus game strikes that the action begins to heat up. While it doesn’t really make it to the big leagues of consecutive respins, Hold & Spin Rock Vegas has the potential to hit a sizeable jackpot prize. At least, when matching symbols clump together and attract boosters from the cluster multiplier or the Mystery Multiplier, or both. The max win is up to 10,000x the solid bet, and the odds of hitting it are also relatively low, all things considered, adding an extra layer of temptation.
Rock Vegas by no means guarantees the same level of success as a fishing game, but it won’t be a big surprise. The game has the same flashy pizzaz, instant prize wins and collectible dynamics as its bass-based predecessor, which might suit a large number of players.
