Cash Surge

Cash Surge: Slot Overview

Online slot makers come up with sorts of creative ideas to dress their games, from psychiatric institutions to lumberjacking, to anime, and beyond, in order to entertain players, but at the end of the day, the biz is largely about, well, money. If you ever needed reminding of the materialistic situation, why not take a look at Pragmatic Plays slot, Cash Surge? The name says it all, really, and provides an opportunity for gamblers to potentially experience surges of cash via a handful of local jackpot prizes, as well as a free spins round where a win multiplier is able to inject extra juice into the surge.

Cash Surge is one of those games that could easily come with a flashing lights warning. Pragmatic Play has turned up the lights and angled them to give the game a moving forward through a pink and purple cosmos sensation. Or, when factoring in the electronica, staring toward a DJ booth and being dazzled by the show. Aural and optical effects are amplified when free spins are active, as the music moves from synthwavey to Asian-inspired video gamey, and the visuals shift into a golden hyperspace, Star Clusters Megaclusters-ish, in order to overload the senses? Kind of works.

A diamond-shaped 3-4-5-4-3 game grid is used in Cash Surge, which awards wins for left-to-right combinations as well as right-to-left along 720 ways. Unusually, Pragmatic Play has not included any ante bets or feature buys in Cash Surge, so the only decision necessary is picking a stake where the options range from 20 c to $/€240 per spin. At its highest level, the RTP is listed as 96.52%, and volatility is high.

Glowy J-A playing card ranks sit at the lower end of the symbol hierarchy, awarding 0.8x to 1.2x the bet for a 5 OAK hit. At the upper end are gold dice, gold bells, gold bars, and crowns, worth 2 to 8 times the bet for five-of-a-kind. Wild symbols appear on reels 2, 3, and 4. They're able to replace all symbols except scatters.

Cash Surge: Slot Features

As its extras, Cash Surge has a Money Award feature and a round of free spins with a multiplier that can only be triggered organically.

Money Award

Above each reel are 5 different money awards. From left to right are the Minor awards prizes starting from 10x up to 100x, the Mega starting from 200x up to 1,000x, the Ultra fixed at 5,000x, the Major starting from 50x up to 250x, and the Mini starting from 5x up to 75x the bet. Lightning symbols may appear on all reels except the middle reel. When a Lightning symbol hits, it increases the money award above it by 0.5x the bet. When at least one Lightning symbol hits, there is a random chance of triggering the Bonus Wheel Money Award. When triggered, the wheel spins to award a money award, which then resets back to its starting level.

Multiplier

In the base game, a multiplier staring at x1 is present. Hitting exactly 4 scatters on different reels increases the multiplier by x0.5. The multiplier is used to multiply winning combinations in the next free spins round, and it resets back to x1 after a round of free spins has ended.

Free Spins

Hitting at least 1 scatter symbol on each reel pays out 1x the bet, and spelling SURGE using scatters activates the free spins round. Players get 4 free spins, which can increase by +1 free spin for each scatter randomly that triggered the feature. Before free spins begin, each scatter symbol reveals +1 free spin or +1x multiplier that is added to the number of free spins awarded and the multiplier. The round can be retriggered by landing at least 5 scatters to form the word SURGE, and +1 free spin is awarded for every scatter on the screen.

Cash Surge: Slot Verdict

Cash Surge does a good job of blasting the senses when it hits the screen. The visuals are eye-grabbing, in their way, and the music keeps its foot on the tempo gas. The game gets a nitro injection when free spins kick into life, so if you can trigger them early on, then Cash Surge might well pull you onto what could be an exciting ride. Audiovisually, at least. The gameplay and features weren't quite so adrenalised. A lot of the time, the actual gaming seemed to take a back seat to the emotional ride induced by the graphics and sounds combo, and the game, as a whole, is an example of Pragmatic Play's ability to buff and polish a game to a particular shine the studio excels at.

As for the mechanics, they're alright, nothing special. Four of the local jackpots are able to grow larger when Lightning symbols appear, in a similar way to 5 Buffalo Wild 2, which was reviewed around the same time. One difference between the two slots is the way Cash Surge's main prize is 5,000x at all times and cannot shrink or grow beyond that amount. By the way, manage to scoop the Ultra prize, and you've achieved Cash Surge's max win, as payouts are capped at 5,000 times the bet. Could that happen outside of the Ultra money award? Hard to say, but there are a lot of ways to win, symbol values aren't terrible, and free spins do benefit from a winning combination multiplier, so who knows how far the complementary features can go.

Obviously, Pragmatic Play wasn't trying to make a massive statement or take over the gambling world with Cash Surge, so while there are goods and mehs about the game, at the end of the day, it does feel like a pretty dime a dozen slot that got a bit old rather quickly.