Elemento

Elemento: Slot Overview

Swedish-based developer Fantasma Games broadens their portfolio with Elemento, an online slot built around the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water. Elemento is Fantasma's first grid slot, and the studio has made the most of the opportunity by going relatively large. Large is an appropriate adjective to describe the grid's size and potential. To get the most out of Elemento, players benefit from a host of extras such as cluster pays, avalanches, Element Wilds, free spins plus a progressive multiplier.

Linking Fantasma's game with one of the most popular grid slots on the market, there's a definite Reactoonz feel to the wide-eyed, innocent-looking icons populating the board. Pay symbols sit within a 7x7 inner grid called the Play Area, while modifier symbols sit in the outer ring known as the Element Area, creating a 9x9 sized game. Outside this space, the rest of the screen is unusually plain for Fantasma. Typically, their games boast rich backgrounds, often fantasy-based, adding depth to the activity taking place on the reels. This time, there's a more simply designed swirling purple cloud effect. Not that it detracts from the gameplay – more of an observation. To the left-hand side are four counters, keeping track of the Element Wilds, covered below.

On the whole, Fantasma has designed a dependable grid slot, and its stats help bear this out. The RTP is decent already on 96.33%, but when activating the feature buy (where available), this rises to the outstanding figure of 97.94%. High volatility suits the gameplay, resulting in stretches of cruising, interspersed by long sequences of winning avalanches. Should the ball really start to roll, then sizeable wins are certainly on the cards.

Eight symbols make up the regular pays, divided into four low and four high. Lows are a little green, a big green, a purple, and a red candy looking symbol. Then there are four cute characters worth up to 6 to 20 times the stake when clusters of 15 or more appear. There is a wild, but it only appears via features, as we will see.

Elemento: Slot Features

Built around a cluster pays system means that wins are formed of 5 or more adjacent matching symbols connecting horizontally or vertically. When clusters form, they are removed from the board so new symbols can avalanche down into the spaces. Avalanches cause consecutive wins to hit until no new clusters appear, then the next spin can occur. If a cluster win does not include an Element Wild, one may be spawned in the Element Area.

Elemento provides a satisfying cocktail of features built to amplify each other's pay out ability. Central to the action is 4 Element Wilds which appear exclusively in the Element Area. At the start of every spin, up to 6 wild symbols appear at random positions in the Element Area and shift clockwise following a successful avalanche. Now, Element Wild symbols that are part of a cluster win are activated, similar to the system used Maze Escape Megaways. This also increases the corresponding Element Meter by +1, and when avalanches end, active elemental wilds are played out in a specific order;

• Fire Wild randomly adds 2 to 10 wild symbols to the Play Area for a new win evaluation, which may kick off a new avalanche sequence.
• X Flood transforms 9 symbols in an X shape on the Play Area into the same symbol. It's possible for 2 X Floods to trigger on a single spin, creating 2 x shaped patterns to increase the chance of creating winning clusters.
• Demolition picks 1 low pay symbol at random. All instances of this symbol type are removed from the play area, triggering a new cascade. Up to 4 symbols can be removed from one Demolition.
• Tornado chooses 1 symbol at random and 8 symbols adjacent to this one are either turned into the chosen type or are removed. Tornados can trigger twice.

If you manage to activate all 4 Element Wild symbols in a single spin sequence, 5 free spins are your reward plus 1 free spin for the total amount of  Element Wild symbols activated in the base game spin. In free spins, every avalanche increases a win multiplier by +1, up to a maximum of x99. Players can also extend the round since activating all 4 Element Wilds retrigger the feature – without limit.

Lastly, those who wish to jump straight to the bonus have the option to do so using the feature buy button. For a price of 60 times the bet, this will set in motion a spin which is guaranteed to trigger free spins.

Elemento: Slot Verdict

It's hard to find too many holes in this performance, although you may find a couple if you look hard enough. For example, the visual appearance is one of those aspects that may divide players - some will love the cute characters and neon-like colours, while others may look at it as a kind of dull Reactoonz knock-off. The test panel was mostly positive, but not all were into it. Another problem is that the gameplay can feel annoyingly slow at times since spin sequences can take a long time to complete. You often get 10 seconds of animations for something like a 0.5x return.

Having said that, Fantasma's first grid slot offers everything a fan of this style could ask for, from its successful cluster pays/avalanche combo, to its bundle of modifiers, to multipliers in free spins. Cap it all with a juicy potential, and you've got a nicely playable grid slot on your hands.

For those who like to leap right into the thick of it, then Elemento's feature buy is a very tempting way of cracking the game's best moments. For one, it's reasonably priced as far as these things go, and you don't just go straight to free spins either which is appreciated. Instead, you get a lengthy round of cluster wins to activate all Elemental Wilds. It's not only possible to collect a good number of free spins during this process, but also pile up a solid win to start the round off with. This leads us to potential, where Elemento once again delivers, capable of wins as large as 16,000 times your stake.

If you want to nit-pick, you could say Elemento isn't a paradigm shift. Yet, that's not really an issue when everything else is so slickly designed.