Roman Colosseum Slots
Themes set in the past always remain a firm favourite of gamblers when looking to spend a bit of quality time and play for real money on a casino slot machine. The excitement of being transported across time to the past means we can all imagine what it must have been like to live in such ancient times.
Roman Colosseum by Novomatic carries the player to ancient Rome on its 5 reels and more precisely to the Colosseum, the home of the gladiator. Such a lavish setting demands lavish rewards and Novomatic doesn’t disappoint at all with some nifty added features. The pay table is an extremely healthy one that befits wealth and lifestyle of a Roman Emperor.
Let Battle Begin
The stone colosseum is round so spectators can see the full fighting action. Its design uses plenty of roman scroll designs on columns and great statues of metal, marble and gold line the archways. Standing at 48 meters high in all its glory and holding a crowd of over 50,000, the colosseum stands ready and the control panel invites the player to click on spin for the tournament to begin.
The artwork is sublime for this venture into a gladiatorial world with a number of symbols used on the reels. Even the matter-of-course card symbols that find their way onto most classic slots get a roman transformation with added laurel leaves adorning them. The main character is the gladiator and despite being a master fighter, is also expert wild symbol when called upon and doubles up on wins in the free games. He needs his armour to protect him, so also playing on the reels are a sword, body shield and most importantly, the gladiators helmet.
No ancient roman theme would be complete without a bag of gold coins somewhere and so they get a symbol of their own in Roman Colosseum. As the Emperor looks down over the baying crowd, he sips wine from his gold chalice and it's this vessel that gets its own symbol too. The symbol to watch for is the scatter symbol that is illustrated with an image of the Colosseum as this will trigger the free spins games and reward with a colossus reward.
All Eyes to the Emperor
The scatter symbol takes on a wild transformation, quite literally, as the gladiator wild symbol joins forces to unleash a new power. Once it has made a great payout to the player for appearing in numbers, in its latest form it will double up on any winning combinations along the paylines. It will also allow the games feature to retrigger and continue to reap as much as possible.
However, reels don’t spin for this. Instead, mosaic tiles cover all the tiles in the grid and starting from the top left, the tiles blast away in a cascading motion to reveal the symbols resting against a red cloth backdrop underneath. A nicely added gamble feature allows wins to be further boosted in a game of 50/50 chance that rests on the turn of a playing card. Players can choose red or black to double or lose. To help decide which way to go, along the top is a record of past turns and players can gamble this way up to 5 times on a winning streak. With bets to be placed between 40 and 10000 coins, there are some seriously huge pots to play for.
The Ides of March
Rome isn’t all about gladiators, although they do feature a lot. One of the most famous Romans was Julius Caesar and he appears in the free Golden Rome slot from the developer Leander. The paylines are fixed and the betting range has a refreshingly affordable play scale if choosing to take a punt with real cash, starting at 0.40 to 4 being the max bet to place. It has stacked character symbols and an expanding wild with the Emperor Caesar to help rake in the coins.
The pay table values are multiplied by the line bet so although there are some nice wins, there isn’t anything too jaw dropping. However, the wilds will add multipliers in the free spins round that are triggered by colosseum scatters which can award up to 40 spins. It has an RTP of 95.24% which is below average, but it has some nice 3D graphics to view and transfers nicely to mobile platforms which is a welcome bonus.
With a Turned Thumb
There is so much to like about Roman Colosseum and if a list of boxes needed to be ticked, a lot would be happily marked off accordingly. There are a couple of things that maybe could have been made different. The pay table is a rich one, but the cost of a small bet is a bit steep for those that want to play at low rolling stakes. The return to player percentage is unknown which doesn’t necessarily mean a bad thing, but it is the kind of info that should be ideally available. We loved the way the gamble feature had been designed in keeping with the theme, but it seemed a missed chance to not have used thumbs up or thumbs down images. This would have been great to decide the outcome of double or quits just like in a gladiator arena, rather than the standard playing card, red or black. The Roman Colosseum building in the real world continues to stand the test of time, albeit a bit crumbled. Will this slot of the same name do similar in the casino world? We cannot answer that but we can give it a thumbs up.
