Mega Heist

Mega Heist: Slot Overview

One of the fun things about playing online slots is the ability to live vicariously through the game and pretend you're getting up to stuff you'd never actually do in real life. Okay, online slots can't compare to straight video games in the fantasy stakes, but with a bit of imagination and some quality design, modern video slots give players a chance to pretend they're living another life for a bit. A case in point is Mega Heist from game provider Relax Gaming. In Mega Heist, players with a fertile imagination can put themselves in the shoes of hardened criminals, planning a prison break, then, once out, hitting a gas station, a club, and a bank in a 3 level bonus game.

Mega Heist's base game begins in the slammer, where players get a top-down view of the penitentiary. To the left, we've got barred doors; on the top is the game's logo, while to the east and south is barbed wire fencing. Mega Heist is a game about crime, but the characters and the vibe overall is cartoonish. As a comparison, Mega Heist felt like it fell a little along the lines of previous Relax Gaming slots like Snake Arena. In fact, when the little dudes started marching across the grid in the bonus round, the experience actually felt similar to the 2020 release Marching Legions.

Relax Gaming has built a reputation for building highly volatile online slots, and Mega Heist is no exception. In terms of volatility, the game is rated at 5 out of 5 by the studio and has a default RTP value of 96.19% when spin-by-spin betting or 96.5% when buying the feature. Base bets can be set from 10 p/c to $/€50 per spin whilst the action is held on a 5-reel, 4-row matrix with 178 connecting ways to win.

To win some cash on this system, matching symbols must start from the left-hand side of the grid and land on adjacent reels. In addition, symbols must be on the same row or 1 row above or below the one to the left. For pay symbols, Mega Heist has 11 of them. The first 4 are low-pay diamonds, clubs, spades and hearts; the next 3 are a mid-pay bar of soap (cheeky), dice, and handcuffs, while the high pays are 3 crook symbols and a policeman. Values-wise, players are looking at payouts of 2x the bet for 5 of the same lows, 3x the bet for 5 matching mids, and 6-20 times the bet for 5 of the same premium symbols. The sunglassed 'W' symbol is wild and substitutes for all pay symbols on the game board.

Mega Heist: Slot Features

You're not going to make a whole lot of cash in the slammer, so potentially getting your hands on more swag requires progressing from prison to the three locations in the bonus game. Here's how it works.

Escape Bonus

Landing 2 bonus symbols in the base game causes a prison riot, and up to 4 robbers attempt to escape. Robbers move left to right across a grid, Plants vs Zombies style, carrying a bet multiplier or a bonus symbol. Robbers that make it to the Safe Zone on the right to award their prize. Policemen can pop up to catch robbers, losing their prize, and the round ends when no more robbers remain in the Robber's zone. If one or more robbers carrying a bonus symbol reach the Safe Zone, the Mega Heist bonus is triggered. When this happens, up to 3 additional bonus symbols can be awarded.

Mega Heist Bonus

Alternatively, landing 3, 4, or 5 bonus symbols in the base game awards 10, 15, or 30 robbers on the Mega Heist bonus mission. The bonus round has 3 levels, each level offering progressively higher winning potential – level 1, the gas station is 150x, level 2, the club is 1,500x; and level 3, the bank is 15,000x the bet.

Robbers move left to right carrying bet multipliers and potentially collecting power-up symbols, banking their rewards when reaching the rightmost Safe Zone reel. When robbers reach the Safe Zone, they are added back to the robber's pool and can return to the Robber's zone. Carrying a multiplier decreases the bank counter. When the bank counter reaches 0, the round moves to the next level. Police can catch robbers, and when no more robbers remain in the robber pool or in the Robber's zone, the bonus game ends.

Picking up a multiplier power-up also decreases the bank counter. Not all power-up symbols are available at all levels, but this is what they can do:

• Multipliers increase robber's prize by x2, x3, x5, or x10.
• 1, 2, 3, or 5 robbers are added to the pool.
• The robber becomes disguised so police cannot catch them.
• Police do not appear in this round.
• The motorbike takes up to 2 robbers to the Safe zone.
• The bus takes up to 8 robbers to the safe zone.

Buy Feature

When buying the feature for 150x the bet, the Mega Heist bonus game begins with 10, 15, or 30 robbers.

Mega Heist: Slot Verdict

Mega Heist is one of those gambling devices which blurs the lines between traditional online slot and video gaming. Sort of, a little bit. Although, if you're not buying the Mega Heist bonus, then for the majority of the time, Mega Heist acts like a regular slot, landing symbols in the hopes some of them will play ball and form wins using the connected ways system. The connected ways system is arguably more exciting than regular paylines but is a bit fiddlier and less easy to eyeball wins than a regular ways-to-win pay mechanic. Thoughts on the pay system are a little irrelevant in some ways, though, since the main point of Mega Heist is busting out of the clink and marching as many of those robbers across the Robber zone into the Safe zone to collect prizes.

The bonus rounds were when Mega Heist came across a little bit like Marching Legions. Sure, there's a crossover with all the marching etc., yet many of the same emotions stirred up in the older game may well crop up while playing Mega Heist as well. That is, mentally willing the little robber blighters to get a darn move on across the Robber Zone, avoiding the cops, to not only deposit their rewards but to hopefully level up as well - possibly aided by a significant list of power-ups as they attempt to do so. As you might expect, this sort of feature can be entertaining, frustrating, annoying, rewarding, amusing, and all things in between. Getting through the gas station level wasn't the hardest thing ever, though by the same token hitting the bank level wasn't super easy, either. And the bank is where you want to get to since that's where loot to the tune of 15,000x the bet is a possibility.

For the record books, Mega Heist's full potential is actually 16,491 times the bet, not that we are splitting hairs. To sum up, Relax Gaming has once again put on its thinking cap to create a unique way for gamblers to try their luck and, fingers crossed, maybe win some loot. The litmus test is how you feel about the unusual marching robber bonus game. If it looks pretty darn sweet, Mega Heist should be an entertaining curiosity. If not, then it might be better sticking with something more orthodox.