Theme & Design

B-Movie Alien Invasion Action In Classic Pear Fiction Style

Galactic Invaders invokes the classic alien invasion theme from b-movies featuring weird-looking extra-terrestrial creatures intent on taking over the planet. The kind of thing Men in Black does a great send-up of. The backdrop is an urban setting with blue skies filled with flying saucers, whilst the paytable feature three tentacled aliens, soldiers called up to fight them off and a random hero and damsel too. The artistic style is what Pear Fiction do best with the same cartoon humour that makes games like Grannies vs Zombies popular. If you are a fan of that style you’ll love Galactic Invaders.

RTP and Variance

There are four possible RTP settings for Galactic Invaders. They are 96%, 94.02%, 92.02% and 86.73%. It will be at your casino’s discretion which RTP setting they choose to run the game at. A good choice in my experience is a site like Barz Casino from White Hat Gaming or Casumo Casino, both of which consistently run slots at optimum settings.

Once you have loaded up the game you can check the RTP for yourself by hitting the ‘?’ link under the reels then scrolling through to the bottom of the page that opens up. There you will see Return to Player. If it’s not 96%, you should think about trying a different casino.

This is also a high variance slot, so it will be volatile. It’s a high risk-high reward game so factor that in when choosing your bet size.

Maximum Win

The maximum payout is a rather unimpressive 5,000x. In today’s world of super-high maximum win games, that doesn’t really cut it. However, playing slots isn’t all about the max potential and there are plenty of other reasons to give this game a go, as we will find out.

Symbols and Paytable

Galactic Invaders starts out as a simple 5 reel and 3 row game with 243 win ways per spin. The win ways mechanic is slightly different to paylines. To score wins you need to land identical symbols on adjacent reels, regardless of the row they appear on, from left to right starting at the left most reel.

This gives you the 243 (3x3x3x3x3). However, there is also a symbol split feature, explained below, which can increase the win ways on a single spin to 7,776.

The value in the paytable is not huge but there are plenty of features to boost your wins. The low payers are the cards, Jack, Queen, King and Ace. These are valued at from 0.1x for 3 Jacks up to 1x for 5 Aces. The premiums are the characters – the soldier, the general, the hero and the damsel, valued at from 0.5x for 3 soldiers up to 10x for 5 damsels.

There is also a wild, represented by the alien spacecraft. It substitutes for all pay symbols to create wins and MAY come with multipliers on some occasions. Those multipliers are applied to any win including the wild they appear on.

Features and Gameplay

Galactic Invaders is a simple slot with fun extra features including a useful free spins round where your wins can really kick on. Here is how it works.

SwiftHits Award Jackpots, Re-Spins and Splits

Throughout the game, the gameplay is enhanced by symbols called SwiftHits. These are aliens in red, green and purple and there are three types.

Regular SwiftHits (Green) – land 3 or more of these and you are automatically credited with a 1x, 2x, 5x, 15x, 40x, 60x, 100x, 500x, 1,000x or 5,000x prize.

Respin SwiftHits (Red) – re-spin SwiftHit symbols lock in place for a re-spin of their reel for more potential winning combinations.

Split SwiftHits (Pink) – split SwiftHits trigger between 1 and 3 symbols on their reel to split, turning a 3 row reel into a 4, 5 or 6 row reel and increasing the number of win ways per spin.

Free Spins With Progressive Multiplier

Free Spins symbols appear with a green background on reels 2, 3 and 4. The objective is to land 3 or more on a single spin to trigger the bonus feature.

Unlike most slots that give you a fixed number of spins based on the number of scatter symbols that triggered the round, Galactic Invaders lets you spin a wheel to reveal your free spins number, and a win multiplier to go with them.

The inner wheel displays the free spins number – 8, 10, 12 or 15. The outer wheel, which spins separately, displays a multiplier of 2x, 3x, 5x or 8x. That multiplier will apply to all wins during the round, except those from the regular SwiftHits.

Starting with a high multiplier is better, but even if you start at 2x or 3x you can still grow it because the value of every wild multiplier included in a win is added to your current multiplier value.

And better still, landing 3 or more free spins symbols during the round will add the same number of free spins as you started with onto your current total. So you can keep adding more spins and growing your multiplier further.

The Final Verdict

This is an excellent slot that will help to consolidate Pear Fiction’s reputation as purveyors of games with absurd humour taking inspiration from b-movies, sci fi and comic strips. Don’t let the high variance put you off, the hit rate is strong and there is plenty of fun to be had watching those Alien SwiftHit symbols land and do their thing. The max win might not be that good but the can be overlooked when the production and gameplay is of such a high standard. Great stuff!