Starz Megaways

Explore the wide universe and reach for the proverbial stars on the slot from Pragmatic Play. Starz Megaways will take you on a high-volatility reel journey with expanding wilds, a pay-both-ways mechanic and a free spins round with sticky wilds that can lead to wins of up to 10,000 times your bet.

The game is exclusively available as prerelease at casinos from the GVC Holdings group including Ladbrokes, Coral, bwin and Party Casino. It will go global on 11th June 2020.

Slot Details

Starz Megaways is a video slot with six reels, two to seven rows and up 117,649 ways to win. In every round, the dynamic reels of the Megaways game engine will spin two to seven symbols into view for each reel, creating a virtually unlimited number of combinations of ways from 64 to the maximum 117,649.  Wins are awarded both ways for three to six matching symbol landing on adjacent reels from left to right and from right to left. You can journey into deep space on desktop or mobile from 0.20 to 100 credits per spin. The game has maximum volatility (5/5) with a default RTP of 96.47%. Some operators will opt for a lower RTP setting in the 91 – 94% range, always check the help file to find out which version you will be playing.

The visuals have been kept pretty simple and basic, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Nobody likes an graphics overload. A deep space scene with an intergalactic lights show and the silhouette of the blazing sun is in the background of a frameless game window that seems to be floating in space. An 80s-style electronic soundtrack keeps things lively as long as the reels are spinning.

The pay symbols are all space related, starting at the low end with five planet shapes in brown, dust, green, pink and orange colours, each with a planetary ring system. Hitting six across the reels will yield 0.4x to 0.5x your stake. They are followed by a range of differently shaped gems in pink, blue, red, purple and turquoise colours, awarding 0.6x to 2.5x your bet. A star-like icon in yellow and red is the wild symbol, appearing on reels two to five only and substituting for all regular symbols while a blazing sun acts as the bonus scatter.

Starz Megaways Slot Features

Pragmatic Play has its engines on full-steam ahead as they are aiming to make full use of their Megaways licence. After their debut with Great Rhino Megaways in May 2020, it looks like they will be releasing a new Megaways game every month. They might as well as the engine has proven immensely popular among slotting folks. Surely reason enough to take a look what kind of features and modifiers they have included on their second creation.

In a first of its kind, Starz Megaways benefits from a Pay-Both-Ways mechanic which will award wins for any combination of three to six symbols starting from the left and right. And the good news is that even a six of a kind will be paid both ways. 

If you were looking for tumbling reels with cascading symbols, then you might be disappointed as the slot has plain spinning reels without the reactive win mechanic. However, aiding you in creating multi-way wins are the wild stars. They will turn into Expanding Wilds to cover the entire reel with equally sized wilds any time they land anywhere on reels two to five. In the best case scenario, you would have a stack of 7 wilds on all four middle reels.

The main event is the Free Spins feature which will be triggered when you land minimum three bonus scatters anywhere on the reels in one spin. They will turn sticky for a single respin to potentially land more scatters. Once that concludes, you can look forward to 6, 8, 10 or 15 free spins for three, four, five and six scatters respectively, which cannot be retriggered. The kicker in the bonus round are the Expanding Wilds, which will expand as usual when they land and then turn sticky for the remaining free spins.

Final Verdict

We had a hunch that Pragmatic Play would push out Megaways slots at a high rate and it looks like they will be gracing us every four to six weeks with a new creation. Starz Megaways is to my knowledge the first of its kind using a pay-both-ways mechanic, hence, the team can claim that ribbon. Other than that, it plays rather well but relies a little to much on the wild as the single modifier as it can be quite elusive at times.

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