Ryze

Theme and Design

Ryze is a typically high-quality production with its 6x6 reel set sitting in the dragon’s lair, surrounded by gleaming gold coins and Ryze himself crouching next to it, all in 3-d with a twitching ears and wide eyes. Gems and coins in the paytable positively gleam and a dramatic orchestral soundtrack accompanies your spins. It’s real fantasy dungeons and dragons stuff.

RTP and Variance

Ryze has an RTP of 94%. That is the standard for ELK Studios online slots and whilst it’s a little under the numbers seen in slots with the best RTP rates, it’s fixed, so wherever you play the RTP will be 94%.

This is also a high variance slot so it will blow hot and cold and deliver an uneven win distribution. It requires patience and a good bankroll to hunt down those big moments.

Maximum Win

The top win in Ryze is capped at 10,000x. This is also about average for high volatility games from ELK Studios. They occasionally go higher – check out Nitropolis games for example, capped at 25,000x – but 10,000x is still an enticing prospect, giving you a £1,000 win from a 10p stake for example.

Symbols and Paytable

Ryze is a 6 reel, and 5 to 6 row, cluster pays slot. The grid is offset, so you get some reels with 5 rows and some with 6.

You need to land clusters of 5 or more identical symbols on adjacent positions horizontally or vertically to trigger a win. The fun part about cluster pays slots is that you can build really big clusters – in this case 15 or more symbols in size - with high payouts.

There are 6 pay symbols in the table – 2 coins and 4 gems. The 2 coins are the bronze, valued at from 0.05x for 5 in a cluster, and the silver, valued at up to 2.5x for 15 or more in a cluster. The 4 gems are cyan, blue, pink and gold. These are valued at from 0.2x for 5 cyan up to 15x for 15 or more gold.

There are also Wilds – blue swirling symbols – that substitute for any pay symbol to complete a cluster. More on those in the next part.

Features and Gameplay

Avalanche Wins and Multiplier Wilds 

Central to the gameplay in Ryze is the classic Avalanche Wins mechanic often associated with cluster pays slots. After each win, winning symbols are removed from the grid. Those symbols that remain drop into the spaces left behind. In this case, because of the offset nature of the reels and rows, they may bounce left or right, adding an element of randomness to the process. The spaces left above are then filled by new symbols dropping down.

This process may repeat if new clusters are formed.

In addition, a multiplier wild is ALWAYS added in one of the spaces left when the avalanche occurs. The multiplier starts at 1x and increased by 1x every time it is used in a cluster, moving to a new position each time.

This is an exciting prospect if you get a run of consecutive avalanches, and things get even better if you can include more than one multiplier wild in a cluster because the multiplier values are added before being applied to the win value. Then, once the payout is made, the multiplier wilds all merge into one before the next avalanche, multiplying their values together to create the new multiplier wild value.

For example, if you had a 2x and a 4x, they would become an 8x multiplier wild. This is a powerful feature when you have several multiplier wilds in play at once.

Coins Payouts

As well as standard pay symbols there are also special coin symbols that carry values displayed as multipliers of your stake. They payout when 5 or more appear in a cluster in the same way as pay symbols do. But in this case, after the win they merge like the multiplier wilds, adding all their values together for the new coin.

NOTE: You can also form coins clusters with multiplier wilds in them. Where more than one multiplier wild is involved, their values are added together before being applied to the win.

Burst Symbol Creates Clusters

There is also a Burst symbol, represented by a fire-y ball. If there is one on the grid at the end of an avalanche sequence then it will activate and transform itself and any adjacent pay symbols into the SAME pay symbol or coin, effectively creating new clusters.

Keys, Bonus Games and Super Bonus Games 

The mechanism for unlocking the free spins / bonus game is a clever one here too.

Under each of the 5 reels you will see a key mould. If you spot a bonus symbol on the grid, represented by liquid gold in a pot, watch it drop down with each avalanche and hope it makes it to the bottom row. If it does, the gold is poured into a key mould and the bonus round is triggered.

If it’s a standard Bonus key mould then you get 7 free drops where multiplier wilds are STICKY, giving you the chance to build some big value there.

If it’s a Super Bonus key mould you also get 7 free drops, but now multiplier wilds AND coins are sticky throughout.

You’ll, also get 3 extra spins if another bonus symbol reaches a mould during the bonus game.