RTP and Variance

Before we get into the nitty gritty of the gameplay, let’s take a look at this game by the numbers – Invaders Megaways™ is, as expected, a high variance slot, which means an uneven win distribution that will appeal to risk takers. However, it’s SG’s boast that this game offers a feature trigger on every spin. We’ll take that with a pinch of salt, but it’s fair to say from our testing that Invaders does have regular action, if at the cost of having very low symbol values and therefore very small wins until you hit the free spins bonus round.

The RTP is set to a steady 96.3% and your top payout is capped at £250,000. Bets start at 25p per spins.

Symbols and Paytable

The basic game format in Invaders is a traditional Megaways™ one – that means six reels, each with between 2 and 7 rows, giving you up to 117,649 paylines when all six reels are fully expanded. Wins are triggered by landing 3 or more identical icons on adjacent reels from left to right.

SG have really embraced the theme in every aspect of the artwork here – the low value playing cards are written as crop circles, from 9 through to Ace, whilst the high value symbols are classic retro sci fi fun including a ray gun, a nervous looking cow, a mad scientist, a little green alien, and the Invaders logo.

It’s a little disappointing that the highest paying symbol only pays out 4x for six in a row, but then with the regular feature triggers, something has to give, so we’ll cut SG some slack here.

Features and Gameplay

So, no shortage of features here, from the traditional Cascading Wins through to some very fun and compelling modifiers that come into play in the free spins round, mixing wilds, multipliers, expanding symbols and stacks, and an Alien that triggers an instant increase in paylines up to 1,000,000.

Cascading Reels

SG haven’t forgotten the bread and butter feature that the best Megaways™ games have – look out for this every time you score a win. The winning symbols are removed from the reels and new ones drop in to replace them. If this creates more wins, so the process repeats. Until no more wins occur.

UFO Wild Selector

SG get creative here – above the reels is a 5×1 row containing each of the symbols in the paytable. When a spin is activated, a small UFO hovers over these symbols before choosing one to land on. When this happens, instances of the selected symbol on reels 2 to 5 are zapped and transformed into wilds to increase the chances of scoring a win.

Unicow Feature

One of the highlights of Invaders is the Unicow feature which triggers on base game spins only. When the Unicow lands, EVERY reel will then expand to between 7 and 10 rows high, creating up to 1,000,000 winlines.

Free Spins Feature

Finally, we get onto the main event – the free spins round. You’ll need to land FOUR or more scatter symbols to trigger the spins. Four scatters gets you 7 free spins, five gets you 10 free spins, and six or more gets you 15 free spins. It is also possible to increase the free spins total further during the round by landing between 3 and 6 scatters to get you between 4 and 15 free spins.

Then, once the round begins, the UFO will do its thing above the reels, turning every instance of one symbol into a wild. Additionally, there is a different modifier associated with each symbol, and they work as follows:

• Invaders Logo: All logo symbols will expand to cover the entire reel.
• Mad Scientist: A win multiplier with x2 value is applied to any win. Each successive win in a cascade sequence doubles the win multiplier up to a max multiplier of 256x.
• Alien: if the alien is the selected symbol, each time it lands on the reels, it will enhance the height of the reels as well as each adjacent reel. This can create up to 1,000.000 winning ways.
• Cow: If the cow symbol appears, it becomes a wild with a value of x2.
• Ray Gun: 1 Wild will be delivered to the reels for every ray gun symbol that lands. This doesn’t apply to cascading ray gun symbols.

The Final Verdict

SG have once again shown themselves to be ahead of the pack when it comes to delivering top fun Megaways™ slots. There is a lot to love here and we can be pretty sure that when the dust settles on this release, Invaders will show itself to have longevity and retain popularity for a long time into the future. Not least because of the creative efforts that have gone into weaving the theme and inherent humour throughout both the artwork and gameplay. Indeed, the fun factor goes way beyond the aesthetics as for a high variance game this slot triggers features at a much higher frequency than most others. So whilst the wins may be small in the base game, at least you are getting some action and engagement for your money, rather than those long draining runs where nothing gives and your balance runs dry. And with 256x multipliers and a max win of £250,000 available in the free spins round, we suspect there will be some epic wins delivered in time here too.

In summary, there are plenty of other game developers out there who would do well to take a leaf out of the SG book and we hope to see more Megaways™ games like this in the future.