Neptune Rising

Plank Gaming, one of the newer studios publishing through Microgaming's partner programme, sets Neptune Rising beneath the waves with the Roman sea god presiding over a fairly conventional 5-reel, 3-row grid. Ten fixed paylines run through the game, and stakes span 0.20 up to 50 per spin, putting the title within reach on desktop or mobile. Blue tones dominate throughout: the reels sit transparent against rolling waves, lightning flashes overhead, and shafts of sunlight break through the clouds to give the whole scene a sense of movement even between spins.

Card values from 9 through A fill out the lower-paying symbols, while treasure chests, dolphins, sea horses and mermaids sit above them. Neptune himself tops the paytable at 75x the stake for five in a row on an active line, and he doubles as the game's wild whenever the Neptune Rising feature fires, stacking across the reels to build bigger combinations.

A lightning strike and a glimpse of Neptune rising from beneath the grid signal that namesake feature, which can fire on any non-winning spin. When it lands, it either stacks identical symbols across the reels or seeds extra scatters and regular symbols into a near-miss, turning what looked like a dead spin into a paying one. The feature teases often, flashing up as if about to trigger before fading again, which keeps the base game active even between wins.

Land three or more gold coin scatters in any position and ten free spins begin, with the Neptune Rising feature staying switched on for the whole round to add winning stacks to every spin. Landing a full screen of Neptune during the bonus pays 750x the stake, and three or more scatters can retrigger the round for another ten spins, so extended sessions are possible once it gets going. The overall game caps out at a maximum win of 5,000x the stake, RTP is set at 95.92% and volatility runs medium to high, with the free spins round doing most of the heavy lifting compared with a fairly modest base-game paytable.