RAGE

NetEnt sets Rage inside a firelit tavern, complete with guttering candles and a hearth roaring at the back of the screen, the kind of room built for a party of adventurers to unwind after a dungeon crawl rather than for any grand quest of its own.

The reel grid takes a hammer shape, running 2-2-4-4-4 across five reels for 256 ways to win. Low-paying symbols need three or more matching icons on adjacent reels starting from reel one; high-paying symbols only need to land on reels one and two plus at least one further reel, with no adjacency requirement. Card values from jack to ace fill the low end of the pay table, while a mage, an elf, a female warrior and a horned male warrior make up the four premiums. Five matching lows return 0.6x to 0.8x the stake, and five matching premiums pay 1.8x to 4x. Ordinary wilds do not appear in the base game at all; they only show up later, as sticky symbols created inside free spins.

Rage's feature set turns on Colossal Symbols: high-pay, combined and scatter icons can all land as 2x2 blocks across reels one and two. A combined symbol fuses either two or four different premium characters into one colossal tile, which then counts as four symbols and substitutes for any of the premiums that make it up. Any win that includes a colossal symbol triggers a respin, during which the colossal tile and every winning symbol from that spin hold their positions; respins keep going until no further matching symbols appear, at which point the accumulated win is paid.

Free spins open through a Scatter Mini Game, triggered when a colossal scatter lands across reels one and two. Reels three, four and five then spin with only scatter symbols able to land, and because a colossal scatter counts as four on its own, the free spin total simply matches however many scatters are showing once the mini-game ends. Through the free spins that follow, any respin can end with symbols on reels three to five matching the colossal symbol turning into sticky wilds at random, and those wilds then stay locked in place for the rest of the round.

Rage carries a default return of 96.07%, with reduced configurations of 94.01% and 88.07% also in circulation, and its medium/high volatility caps out at 1,860x the stake. Stakes run from 0.25 to 100 per spin, and the free spins round can be bought outright for 80x the total bet, which nudges the RTP on that purchase up slightly to 96.08%.