Into the Storm Slot Review
The Scientific Games Corporation (just renamed Light & Wonder) is a revolutionary gambling company headquartered in Las Vegas that creates various land-based gaming products. Their range includes casino management systems, shuffling machines, table games, slots, and other types of electronic gaming equipment. They are famous for pioneering the technology responsible for churning out scratch card combinations in the 1970s. And yes, despite popular belief, they are also quite active on the online side of things, boasting an internet reel-spinning arsenal of some ninety games. Into the Storm is one of their latest releases, appearing in online casino lobbies on April 12th, 2022. It virtually instantly shot up into the top one hundred rankings the day after its release, amassing a sizeable player pool quickly, giving us a reason to review it.
Theme & Design
The theme of Into the Storm is Vikings. Going by our analysis, there are over two hundred and thirty Viking-themed slots online. Into the Storm is currently the most popular of this group, followed by Masters of Valhalla and Power of Thor Megaways. Perhaps Scientific Games looked to time the release of this slot with the one of The Northman, the Hollywood big-budget fare starring Alexander Skarsgård, which boasts a 9th-century Nordic theme. It is sure to generate some Viking fever. For those who are not up on their history, Vikings is a term given to seafaring people from Scandinavia that pirated and raided parts throughout Europe from the late 8th to the 11th century. They weren’t too picky about their targets and boasted a pervasive reputation of extreme and cruel violence.
The Vikings featured in this game are not depicted as brutally as those from history. The tone of Into the Storm is upbeat and cartoony. The visuals here are painterly graphics, and the setting of this slot is a Viking ship sailing the high seas. Everything feels a bit flat here, even though subtle clouds and water animations fill the background. The soundtrack and sound effects of this game, at moments, reminded us of old, early-2000s Sierra strategy games. That is a positive in our eyes. We especially liked how the music amps up in the Free Spins round. It is engrossing.
The presentation here is competent, but it is nothing that will blow your socks off. It is a bit generic if we are 100% honest. But we liked that the buttons’ panel of this slot has the same design as everything else in Into the Storm. It is visually in sync and feels like a part of the slot and not a separate thing.
Specs & Gameplay
Into the Storm’s RTP setting can vary from 90% to 96%. In most cases, operators will carry a version of this game that will feature a return-to-player percentage of 94%. The variance of this title is high, and the number of available paylines is twenty. Bet sizes in this spinner, which utilizes a 5×3 grid, go from as low as $0.2 to as high as $20. The max exposure of this game is x10,500, and Into the Storm produces wins when three to five matching symbols appear in view on the same spin, on adjacent reels.
The low-paying symbols of this slot are rune-like tokens, paying x1 to x2 for five-of-a-kind. The high ones are the Viking helmet and the game’s three title characters. These produce prizes of x4 to x20 for five identical tokens showing up on the reel grid.
A golden plate with a horned helmet is the Wild here, appearing in the base game, and the re-spin feature substitutes all other symbols, except from the Kraken Bonus one. That is the infamous squid-like beast from the abyss that provides entry into the bonus round in this slot. Inside it, various modifiers come into play that we will explain below.
Bonus Features
Know that Into the Storm has a re-spin feature that activates randomly in the base game, adding two to four Walking Wilds on the screen, which move one step left to right on each subsequent re-spin. When one of these Walking Wilds happens to land on top of a standard Wild, a +1 multiplier will get added for the duration of this mode, which ends when no more Walking Wilds are on the reels.
The Kraken is the Bonus symbol (Scatter) here, and it does not appear in the re-spin mode, only in the base game. You must hit three or more to trigger the Into the Storm bonus round, which gets played out on a 9×5 grid, utilizing up to three Kraken Hot Zones, depending on the number of activating Scatters. Note that the regular Kraken symbol is different from the Kraken bonus symbol that shows up in this bonus round. When the latter hits, it animates into a Kraken Hot Zone. Up to three Kraken Hot Zones can get activated in this bonus round, revealing a blank space, a multiplier, or one of four modifiers. The modifiers are a hammer, a Viking coin, a treasure chest, and a hot zone. The hammer doubles a random number of multipliers, the chest collects the values of the current gold multipliers, and the coin increases the number of lives to four.
On every reel rotation, modifiers, or multipliers land within Hot Zones, remaining locked until this bonus round expires. Each Kraken births a Hot Zone by placing x2-x5 multipliers in all adjacent spaces. When zones overlap, then their multipliers get multiplied together. You begin this mode with three lives, and your lives count gets reduced by -1 if no modifiers or multipliers land on a spin. When your spins run out, the total of all the multiplier symbols gets awarded. The goal of this mode is to fill the entire grid to win an x10,000 multiplier.
The Bonus Buy option, titled Buy Pass, allows you to buy your way into this bonus round for 105, x145, or x185, depending on how many activating Scatters you are willing to purchase.
GOSU Verdict
Into the Storm may not have a sizeable max bet option for a high variance slot, but it is still heaps of fun. Some may find its bonus round a tad overly complex, and we agree that things may get confusing for newbies, but we had no problem following everything once we got a decent grasp on how everything works inside it. In essence, you can say that this game somewhat copies Money Train 2, although we are not sure if we totally agree with that. Though, there are undoubtedly similarities between these two titles. Overall, this is not a bad slot. In fact, it offers some terrific hold-and-win gaming.
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