Haul of Hades Slot
Raid your coin horde to pay the ferryman, for Charon waits to take you across the legendary river Styx to the dark depths of the ancient Greek underworld. When the three brothers of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades divided the earths rule into the spheres of air, sea and underworld, it is told that Hades became a cold – but fair ruler of his subjects and realm. Let’s hope the ancient myths are true and that cool wins with fair odds are brought to you in this darkly styled game!
It’s perhaps no surprise to see Novamatic venture into this theme, they have literally a dozen ancient Egyptian slots and it was only a matter of time before the ancient Greek genre was added to their catalogue. I’m thankful that this has a unique edge to it and isn’t another book of Ra game. The question we will be asking is this a godly effort or does it belong in the mythical realm of dead slots?
This slot is a little strange, the structure feels more like it was designed as a free to play machine rather than a cash slot despite being available in both formats. Also it has been out for a few months officially but you won’t find it on too many sites as of yet, we did our play on it at Star Games casino who have both versions online.
Theme
Haul of hades 5x3 reel set sits on an almost cartoonish underworld backdrop, occasionally an animated bat flies across the screen, lightning strikes and the 40 pay-line symbols either side are lit by realistic underground torches. It’s a creepy feel, and not quite blended as half the animations and backdrop are in the cartoon style whist the others are realistically rendered. It is however, far from boring so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt for being slightly overly eclectic.
Whatever you think of the graphical side the sounds effects are absolutely spot on, from the crack of lightning and flap of the bats wings, the reels initiate with a sound like scraping stone and the symbols drop into place with heavy thuds. The wins are punctuated by heavy gothic music riffs and each Olympian image has its own musical intro suited to their character and role.
Features
Structure wise you have a typical 5x3 reel set with 40 fixed play-lines, playable from 1 coin to 200 per line for a minimum bet of 40 coins and a max of 8000, no progressive jackpot to be found although you do get a small amount of free spins as a bonus round and a single Wild. The big pay characters are Hades, Zeus, Athena and Aphrodite in order from high to low, 5 playing card symbols from A-10 form the lower wins and the game logo forms the wild and largest value combination – 5 of them at max bet will net you 200000 coins!
Wins are formed left to right with 3x symbols required for the lower pay icons whilst 2x of Hades, Zeus or the Wild will grant you a heroic victory. The wild substitutes for all symbols except the free spins logo, you need 3 of these stacked on the middle reels to grant yourself 7 free spins. 7 Spins may not seem much but they hold massive potential value, when you trigger the free-spins round one of the god symbols is chosen as a stacked symbol for the duration of the bonus, land several of these in a line or combine them with a wild for some godlike coin rewards.
An auto-play function is included as is the ability to instantly finish a spin using the space bar if you really want to up the pace of play. Choose to try your luck even further and test Hades patience with the simple playing card gamble game which comes up after every win. You can either collect your win or bet red/black to double up, be warned though if you guess wrong the gods will drag your existing win back to the underground never to be seen again!
Summary
The longer I play the game the more I like it, a new theme, unique design with interesting graphics and sound effects. The small number of symbols keeps its simple and easy to follow and watching for the stacked symbols to drop in creates a decent amount of anticipation. I would like a scatter driven bonus round, as just the free spins alone feels a little bare, but in the end the online players will judge if this is an epic slot worth of its theme.
