Aliens Among Us

Aliens Among Us: Slot Overview

Developer Hacksaw Gaming has built an enviable reputation for designing highly original games, but the occasional reskin does escape the studio from time to time, Munchy Milo or Le Bunny, for instance. If you're reading this, you've just caught up with another one. Titled Aliens Among Us, it tells a story of alien invasion, abduction, and paranoia, which has been built on the internal structure of Life and Death. That means a mechanical focus on expanding wild multiplier activity across its four middle reels, while avoiding being sucked up to the mother ship, probed in all the wrong places, and governments that are terrified of the peon masses finally knowing the truth of mankind's place in the universe.

Aliens Among Us is set against a sweeping, twilight-drenched rural landscape, serving up a quirky, sci-fi vibe where government cover-up meets countryside paranoia. On the left, we've got a G-Man, more than ready to deny everything, facing off against a tinfoil-hatted local farmer who probably just wants the extraterrestrials to stop grabbing his cows. Make it into free spins, and the sky transforms into an eerie, neon-green alien invasion fog in the lower free spins round before transitioning to a dramatic, fiery orange sky, highlighted by a UFO that has crashed landed on the farm. Since little to no time was needed to develop the gameplay, the studio was able to pour max attention on producing a visually humorous out-of-this-world encounter right in the heart of the countryside.

Featuring a 19-payline setup, Aliens Among Us plays out on a 6x5 grid. Players can choose their preferred stake from a betting range of $/€0.10 to $/€50 per spin, with four feature buy options available for those looking to hasten the action. The math model is marked as 4 out of 5 for volatility and has a top RTP configuration of 96.36% (though lower settings exist).

Grey, spacey fonted 10 to A royals are the low pays, while hats, FBI badges, ray guns, bats, and magnets are the highs. A 6 OAK royal combination pays 3 to 10 times the bet, increasing to 15 to 50 times the bet when hitting combinations of 6 matching high pays.

Aliens Among Us: Slot Features

Alien symbols and Expanding Alien Reels are features available in the base game and the two bonus rounds, Beam Me Up and Farmageddon.

Alien Symbol and Expanding Alien Reels

There are four Alien symbols, each connected to a reel with the same colour. Alien symbols may only land on the middle four reels.

• Blue Alien - Connected to reel 2, and can have multipliers of x2, x3, or x4.
• Red Alien - Connected to reel 3, and can have multipliers of x5, x6, x7, x8, or x9.
• Yellow Alien - Connected to reel 4, and can have multipliers of x10, x15, x20, or x25.
• Green Alien - Connected to reel 5, and can have multipliers of x30, x40, x50, x75, x100, or x200.

Alien symbols substitute for all paying symbols. When an Alien participates in a win, the value of the payout is multiplied by its multiplier. Multipliers are added together before being used if more than one wild is part of the same win. Furthermore, Alien symbols expand to become fully stacked if they land on their connected reel, and the symbol would be part of a win when expanded. Alien Reel multipliers add their multipliers together when more than one is part of the same win.

Beam Me Up Bonus Game

Landing 3 scatters in the base game triggers the Beam Me Up bonus with 10 free spins. This bonus keeps the base game mechanics, plus it has an increased chance of landing Alien symbols. Landing 2 or 3 scatters in this bonus or the next one awards a further +2 or +4 free spins.

Farmageddon Bonus Game

Farmageddon's 10 free spins are awarded by landing 4 scatters in the base game. This bonus has the mechanics of Beam Me Up. In addition, when an Alien symbol lands on its connected reel, that coloured Alien symbol is activated. Activated Alien symbols expand into an Alien Reel no matter which of the four central reels they land on, as long as they will be part of a win when expanded.

Feature Buys

Players looking to shortcut to the features have four options at their disposal. Activating BonusHunt FeatureSpins costs 3x the bet to increase the chance of triggering a bonus game to 5 times more likely. For 60x,the X-Farm Files FeatureSpins guarantee at least three Alien symbols per spin. Alternatively, players can jump into the main bonus rounds: Beam Me Up can be bought for 100x, while the higher-tier Farmageddon bonus has a price tag of 200x the bet.

Aliens Among Us: Slot Verdict

While purists might roll their eyes at a mechanical copy of a previous piece of work, Aliens Among Us goes to show that reskins can be fun for those who don't mind doing the same thing twice. Why the reskin? Who can say, but Life and Death was pretty heavy going for a slot, and not everyone wants to be reminded of the inevitable demise of their current incarnation while risking their hard-earned dough to fire a thrill. Aliens Among Us solves this problem by providing an amusing, if a little cliched, look at alien invasion, abduction, and governmental cover-up in a light-hearted environment that swaps existentialism for tongue-in-cheek B-movie charm.

The gameplay retains a heavy reliance on the four middle reels to drive up the action. Here is where Alien symbols hit, and in the right conditions, they expand into full reel wild multipliers. The further to the right on the grid this occurs, the better, since multiplier values ascend from left to right. The Green Alien is actually a friendly one due to having potential multipliers of up to x200. At least, this is the case in the base game and the Beam Me Up bonus. Farmageddon adds a turbo to the mix by letting Alien symbols expand no matter the reel colour combination, as long as they have been activated. It's a fairly simple system, but a strong one when Alien Reel multis are chunky, and two or more are simultaneously hitting to combine their powers.

As before, Aliens Among Us caps wins at 15,000x the bet, and this figure can be achieved in any of the game modes as evidence of the potential in the four Expanding Alien Reels. Aliens Among Us scores low when it comes to leading experimental gamblers to the edge of the unknown before pushing them over it, but the lighter theme provides a chance for players to enjoy the mechanics of Life and Death without the seriousness.