Ways of Athena: Slot Overview
Software provider Thunderkick is a studio that displays an ongoing interest in myth, legend, and fantasy, dropping slots such as Midas Golden Touch and the follow-up Midas Golden Touch 2, its Beat the Beast series, as well as Sword of Arthur. This time, the team has turned to Ancient Greece for inspiration and returned from their journey with Ways of Athena, a slot featuring the goddess of wisdom and war, an expansive Matching Mystery symbol mechanic, and a progressive free spins round.
A veritable arcadia greets players when Ways of Athena displays its base game on their screens. It can be fun to romanticise the past, especially the distant, ancient past, as a place of beauty, poetry, and reason, and the sun-drenched scene Ways of Athena puts up certainly looks like the sort of place that would harbour those traits. If, when looking out the window or on the telly, you see climate catastrophe, political ineptitude, and a world teetering on the precipice of ruin, firing up Ways of Athena as an escape to a more enlightened time might be a soothing balm.
Ways of Athena's gaming area is a 5-reel, 3-row matrix, which can squeeze a lot onto it. By default, this winning from left to right, starting on the leftmost reel setup, supplies 243 ways to win, but a splitting symbols mechanic means that ways to win can go as high as 43,923. Two RTP variants have been designed, the maximum return coming in at 94.21%, and both variants are highly volatile. As well as deciding whether to activate the BET+ ante bets or the feature buy, players are able to choose a stake of 10 c to $/€100.
Wreathed 10-A card royals are the game's lower-paying symbols, awarding players 0.7 to 1 times their bet for a 5 OAK winning way. Following on from them are vases, harps, shields, helmets, and Athena as the high pays, worth 2 to 5 times the bet for 5-of-a-kind. Wild symbols replace any of the pay symbols to complete winning ways. They land on all reels, so a 5 OAK line of wilds pays 5 times the bet.
Ways of Athena: Slot Features
In Ways of Athena, the features on offer are Matching Mystery symbols, a bonus game, BET+ ante bets, and a feature buy.
Matching Mystery Symbol
On each spin, Matching Mystery symbols may appear on reels 2 to 5. A maximum of 2 may land per reel. They randomly match with the same chosen symbol on the leftmost reel and transform into double symbols, providing 2 pay ways per symbol.
Bonus Game
Hitting 3 scatter symbols triggers 8 free spins, plus 2 free spins are awarded for each additional scatter up to a maximum of 44 free spins. Matching Mystery symbols that match a scatter symbol on the leftmost reel become double scatter symbols. In the bonus game, collecting Matching Mystery symbol orbs fills the meter below the reels. The first fill increases pay ways per Matching Mystery symbol to 3, and the second fill increases it to 5. Each time a fill occurs, +2 free spins are awarded. Scatter symbols are not part of the bonus game.
BET+
Ways of Athena's BET+ section has three choices players may activate. They are:
- Bonus Boost - each spin is 2 times more likely to trigger the bonus game. The cost is 1.3x the bet per spin.
- Bonus Boost Plus - each spin is 5 times more likely to trigger the bonus game. The cost is 2.2x the bet per spin.
- Flames of Athena - guarantees 1 or more Matching Mystery symbols on each spin. The cost is 5x the bet per spin.
Feature Buy
It is possible to pass over the base game and go straight to the free spins feature by buying the bonus round for 100 times the bet.
Ways of Athena: Slot Verdict
Ways of Athena is, in many ways, pun intended, a classic Thunderkick slot. It brims with mythological goodness, looks glorious, and has a short list of uncomplicated yet forceful features. It's the sort of game that doesn't tax the brain box hard to figure out how everything works, so users are able to sit back, lock-in, and pound their way through a few spins. The base game might be a bit repetitive in the most vanilla setting (no BET+). However, the occasional Matching Mystery symbol is bound to hit eventually, and the ways pay system does its part in pushing the action along.
Ante bets might not be to everyone's tastes, but the Flames of Athena option made a noticeable difference in how Ways of Athena functioned. From memory, the very first spin with it activated triggered a 20+ free spins bonus game. Keep in mind that just one Matching Mystery symbol is needed to trigger free spins when it matches with a scatter on the leftmost reel. Free spin sessions could be a miss, even when a large number of free spins were awarded. The game has a knack for avoiding linking the best symbols when it's going through its Matching Mystery hype-up/tease sequence. If you find yourself on the preferable side of the high volatility and orb collection is going well, you can imagine how the game might open up. With 25,000x as a win cap, Ways of Athena can possibly open up quite wide, too.
Whilst unlikely to blow the myth slot scene right apart, Ways of Athena is nevertheless a solid performer, doing something rarely seen with the humble mystery symbol, boosting the possibilities with a progressive element in the bonus round, and dropping everything in an idyllic setting.
Ways of Athena delivers the sort of sturdy, straightforward entertainment players have come to expect from Thunderkick.
