Athena Ascending

Athena Ascending: Slot Overview

Athena, the Ancient Greek goddess of craft, war, and wisdom, returns to headline in an online slot from software provider Play'n GO bearing the title of Athena Ascending. Being a follow-up to an earlier game called Rise of Athena, if your first suspicions were, hmm, similar name, similar game, you would, in many ways, be correct. Both slots are similar in terms of looks, atmosphere, and gameplay. However, while much of the experience is close, several elements have been squeezed to juice the volatility/potential reward quotient.

The scenery has changed a bit as well, though you can tell at a glance that both games are related. Instead of visiting a temple in the clouds, the setting feels more down to earth this time. A partially transparent game grid reveals another temple-like background with smoky braziers, well-kept shrubbery, and a hazy cloud-filled sky. With a bit of imagination, players could well picture themselves at the top of the Acropolis, about to enter the Parthenon, which was a temple dedicated to Athena in the fifth century BC. Like the previous game, Athena Ascending has a clean-lined, airy feel to it, this one accentuated by a dramatic vocal soundtrack.

Where Rise of Athena had a medium volatile math model, Athena Ascending pumps this setting up, pushing it into a 'high' classification, or 7 out of 10. The RTP, as always with Play'n GO, is variable, topping out at 96.2% before dipping to a number of lower configurations, depending on the market. A rather simply set-up game, Athena Ascending is played on a 5-reel, 3-row matrix, with 20 paylines for landing winning combinations. Available on any device, players may select stakes of a budget-friendly 5 p/c up to $/€100 per spin.

Not a lot has changed appearance-wise when it comes to the regular pay symbols, though the individual line win values have been decimated. For the lows, we get 10-A card royals, designed in a sort of SPQR style, while the high pays are a scroll, urn, helmet, Pegasus, and Athena. All pay for three to five of a kind, though landing two Athena symbols can constitute a win as well. For values, a five low-pay symbol win is worth 1x the bet, whereas five of the premiums pay 2x to 50x the stake.

Athena Ascending: Slot Features

As in the previous game, Athena Ascending's features aren't hugely complicated and revolve around wild multipliers, free spins where wilds are semi-sticky, and a residual respins element.

Wilds

Wilds appear on reels 2, 3, or 4 and land with a win multiplier of x1, x2, x3, or x4 which is applied to any win they are part of. If more than one wild is used in a win, the multiplier values are multiplied together up to a maximum value of x64.

Free Spins

The owl associated with Athena is the game's scatter symbol. Landing 3, 4, or 5 owl scatters awards 5 free spins plus a payout of 1x, 20x, or 500x the bet, respectively. In free spins, wild symbols stick to the reels when they hit until their multiplier reaches x4. How it works is that on each following free spin, sticky wilds have their multiplier value increased by +1. When it reaches x4, it falls off the grid for the next spin. When free spins end, if any sticky wilds are in view, respins are awarded until no wild remains on the grid. Scatter symbols are not present on the reels during the feature, so they cannot be retriggered.

Athena Ascending: Slot Verdict

While the high-level concept is similar between Rise of Athena and Athena Ascending, when you drill down into the details, they are in some ways also rather different. Though, perhaps not enough to change the minds of those who thought the original game was kinda meh, and vice versa. Graphically the standard is ok, and the soundtrack helps deepen the ambience, so anyone up for some simplistic Ancient Greek era gaming won't be let down too much by Athena Ascending's audio-visuals. If you're in the mood for innovation, there's a bit, but neither Athena games have especially boiled over with ground-breaking ideas.

So what's new this time? To bullet point the changes, so to speak, volatility is up, as is max winning potential, reaching as high as 10,000x the bet – double what was available in the previous game. Less free spins are initially awarded, but this time, wild multipliers increase in value between spins rather than decrease, mixing things up. The respin feature has been bolted on the end of free spins should wilds be in view on the final spin, too, possibly lengthening a bonus round and pushing out a few extra wins. Seen solely as a follow-up, Play'n GO has been quite astute with the changes it has made, kneading out the original slot like dough to make something relatively new with it.

Then again, the first wasn't wildly imaginative, to begin with, so it'll be interesting to see how Athena Ascending is received. It's hard to really fault, having been built to a reasonably high standard without being a game the Play'n GO team really went to town on. Then again, perhaps they did, but it didn't feel like Athena Ascending was the sort of slot that particularly taxed Play'n GO's considerable powers of design and execution.