Chronicles of Olympus II – Hades

Alchemy Gaming's third entry in the series, Chronicles of Olympus II – Hades, trades Zeus's cloud-wrapped Olympus for a hot, rocky underworld realm lit by sparks, rendered with the same painterly character art as its siblings. Hit frequency on the default setup runs at 25.33%, one of the more precisely documented figures in the series.

The game keeps the same five-reel structure as the earlier Olympus titles, still generating 1,024 ways to win, with matching symbols forming a payout on consecutive reels starting from the left. Ten to Ace card ranks fill the low end of the paytable, while five deity-themed characters sit above them; five-of-a-kind pays run 0.8 to 1.2x the stake on the card ranks and 1.6 to 4x on the characters. A wild appears on every reel, substitutes for any regular symbol, pays 5x the stake when five appear together, and can add an x2, x3 or x5 multiplier to whatever combination it completes.

Three scatter colours drive the bonus structure, each restricted to particular reels. Red scatters can land anywhere in the base game and on the outer two reels during Free Spins; Blue scatters are confined to the outer reels in the base game only; the new Diamond scatter — the one addition Hades makes to the formula — appears on the outer reels in both phases. Two Reds bank a token on the X-Up Trail, raising the active multiplier; two Blues instead lock in a permanent upgrade to one Trail level, working from the top down; and once the whole ladder has turned blue, two more Blues push the top level to x25. Landing two Diamonds in the base game skips straight to Free Spins at whatever multiplier the Trail currently shows.

Reaching Free Spins the ordinary way needs three, four or five Reds, which pay out 2x, 20x or 100x the stake on top of eight spins at the current X-Up level. Inside the round, two more Reds add a pair of spins and another Trail token, while two Diamonds grant the highest multiplier plus two extra spins; whatever tokens remain are wiped once the round ends, and none accrue once the top multiplier is already active. A Buy Bonus option skips to the round outright at a locked x25 multiplier for 200 times the stake, though tokens cannot be earned on a bought round.

RTP is configurable, with 96.05% the default alongside 94.05% and 92.05% alternates; volatility is rated high, and a top win of 5,000x the stake is available on stakes of 0.20 to 50 per round. Between the Diamond shortcut, the locked Buy Bonus multiplier and the ordinary Trail climb, Hades gives a player more than one route into the same Free Spins feature.