Dropz

Theme and Design

Staring into the backdrop of Dropz you feel like you have been miniaturized and dropped into the a tub of ice cream, donuts and sweets all mixed up with caramel sauces and melting chocolate. It’s a sickly mix and depending on your palette will either reel you in or turn you off.

The grid itself, a 6x6 expanding to 7x7 or 8x8 with level-ups is a weird jarring mix of candy and chocolate. The latter are blocker spaces that unlock in avalanches, but for our tastes the contrast of pink sweet and dark chocolate just didn’t sit right and the whole thing looks weirdly unsettling.

RTP and Variance

Dropz has two possible RTP settings: 94% or 87%. Most UK casinos will set the game to 94% but it's worth checking on the game settings page once you've loaded up Dropz to see what RTP it runs on. We checked three UK casinos:

• Casumo (independent): 94%
• BacanaPlay (Skill on Net): 94%
• Dream Vegas (White Hat Gaming): 94%

94% is a low number for RTP in a slot game. Most have a top RTP level of around 96%. ELK Studios do not build games with particularly high RTP but for comparison, you can get a better return on games like Route 777 (96.3%) or Wild Seas (96.3%).

Dropz is a high variance slot though generally not as volatile as some of ELK's toughest games like Avalon Gold or Pacific Gold for example. Nevertheless it remains an unpredictable game at times.

Maximum Win

The top win potential in this game is really good at 25,000x which is excellent for a game with a medium(ish) volatility rating. It competes with other ELK Studio games like Avalon Gold too.

Symbols and Paytable

With its chaotic mix of sweets and chocolate blockers, Dropz can feel quite disorientating when you first start playing. It’s worth loading up a demo version – you can do this easily from the game menu at Casumo – before you play for real, to get a feel for the game.

The game grid starts as a 6x6 with a mix of inactive chocolate blockers and standard symbols. To score wins you need to land at least 3 identical symbols on consecutive reels starting from the left. The row the symbols are on is irrelevant – they just need to be on adjacent rows.

This gives you 729 paylines which isn’t a bad starting point.

Symbols are a mix of sweets and fruits with modest values. Low payers are the sweets in blue, green, yellow and red with a very modest 0.25x for six on a line.  Premiums are represented by the fruits – lemons, strawberries, apples and grapes. These pay up to 5x for six on a line. But there is also a lucky 7 which pays out up to 50x for six on a line.

There is also a Wild symbol that can appear as standard or lock in for 3 drops.  These can substitute for any other symbol to complete a win line.

Features and Gameplay

Each spin in Dropz is an opportunity not just to score wins by landing identical symbols across paylines but also to unlock win multipliers and new levels with a bigger game grid, as well as trigger a bonus round with 8 rows and 5 new drops.

To get there, you have the core game mechanic of Avalanche Wins. It appears in many online slots including Megaways games like Bonanza and NetEnt’s iconic Gonzo’s Quests. Normally, just winning symbols are removed after a winning spin. But in the case of Dropz,

ANY ADJACENT chocolate blockers are also removed. If they are holding a special symbol, then that symbol become active.

What’s interesting is that before the avalanche happens you can already see which symbols are locked into the chocolate blockers. So, keep your eyes out for ones you want to use and hope they get unblocked.

As usual, avalanches continue until no more wins are formed.

Whilst all this is going on you have FOUR possible objectives to achieve.

First, you can land an upwards arrow which triggers a level-up once the current avalanche sequence ends. That means you open up a 7x7 or 8x8 grid for your next play.

Second, you can unlock an extra Drop by landing or uncovering the circular arrow. This gives you one extra drop at the end of the current sequence and more chances to score wins or unlock extra levels.

Third, you can unlock a multiplier to apply to your wins. This is done by landing matching pairs of symbols. The required pair is displayed on the top right of the game grid. You’ll need to land the pair three times within one avalanche sequence to unlock the next multiplier level.

And finally, by landing THREE bonus symbols you can unlock the free dropz round which is a free spins games played on 8 rows with 5 free plays. There are no level ups in the free plays round but wilds do remain on the grid between drops.

That is quite an exhausting set of features. The point here is that there are four possible triggers available at any one time. That might be a good thing – after all, if you fail to unlock a multiplier, perhaps you’ll unlock the free drops instead, or trigger a level up.

But it never felt like that. Instead, it often feels quite dizzying watching events unfold, and we never quite settled into the game.