Milkshake XXXtreme

Milkshake XXXtreme: Slot Overview

Back in the day, a milkshake was a simply concocted beverage. These days… pah, look out, milkshakes are about as complicated a culinary delight as they get. Protein shakes, freakshakes, peanut butter and jelly banana brunch shakes, the only limits are imagination, cup size, and gravity. It's in this sugary drinking spirit that we encounter Milkshake XXXtreme, an online slot from software developer NetEnt. However, unlike its cousin Starburst XXXtreme, Milkshake XXXtreme does not appear to be a remake of an earlier game or be, for that matter, as hugely extreme. It is very milkshakey, however, so if you are in the mood for some sweet-tooth indulgence, why not grab a straw and come take a look?

You might need shades to go with the straw because Milkshake XXXtreme is a bright, saccharine delight of a game, heavy on pastel-leaning colouration. It's quite simple visually, so instead of being located in a sweetie wonderland, the base game boils down to a 6x6 game grid surrounded by milkshakes and colourful patterns. Jolly enough, though, so players who go all gooey over candy-themed slots should just as easily go gooey over Milkshake XXXtreme as well, due to the similar feel.

Onto the nuts and bolts now, where Milkshake XXXtreme has been optimised to run on tablet, mobile, or desktop devices, taking regular bets of 25 p/c to $/€500 per spin. To be clear, the XXXtreme part refers to a spin enhancement feature which increases the stake and not to the game's math model, which has been classed by NetEnt as low/medium. Depending on the jurisdiction or operator settings, payers can expect theoretical return values of 96.06%, 94.02%, or 88.06%.

Not as unique as it would have been once, Milkshake XXXtreme uses a scatter pays mechanism for awarding wins. How it works is that 36 symbols drop onto the grid each spin, and if at least 8 matching symbols hit anywhere in view, regardless of position or adjacency, players get a pay-out. Moreover, the Avalanche mechanic activates when a scatter win is created. It removes the winning symbols from the panel, and new or existing ones drop down to fill the spaces. As per usual, Avalanches only cease when no new wins form. The value of the reward depends on the symbols, where low pays are spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts, while the high pays are blue, green, orange, and red ice-creams. Interestingly, wilds appear at certain points, substituting for any pay symbol.

Milkshake XXXtreme: Slot Features

Breaking Milkshake XXXtreme down to its constituent ingredients, we find Milkshakes, Boosters, and the XXXtreme Spins component.

Milkshake

On each spin, a Milkshake glass slides next to the reels. Each Milkshake can randomly have a colour of red, green, orange, or blue, a multiplier of between x2 to x100, or starting points of 2-12. When wins are formed, the winning symbols matching the colour of the Milkshake are added to it, increasing the points value by the number of symbols added. When a milkshake is filled with 20 points, 2 new random Milkshakes slide beside the grid, with a limit of up to 4 Milkshakes in view at once. The multipliers of full Milkshake are used to enhance wins at the end of a spin.

Booster Feature

At the start of a new spin or after the Avalanche activates, the Booster feature may randomly trigger, applying a multiplier or Color Booster to any of the Milkshakes by the grid.

• The Multiplier Booster replaces a Milkshake Multiplier with a greater value of x4 to x100, retaining the same number of points.
• The Color Booster replaces any Milkshake with a Rainbow Milkshake, retaining the same Multiplier and number of points. Rainbow Milkshakes collect points from scatter wins, regardless of the colour.

XXXtreme Spins

Here is where the XXXtreme part enters the picture, allowing players to increase their bet in exchange for spin enhancements. There are two options:

• 10x the base bet buys a spin with two Milkshakes to fill and a guaranteed wild.
• 95x the base bet buys a spin with four Milkshakes to fill and 2 guaranteed wilds.

Milkshake XXXtreme: Slot Verdict

For whatever reason, at the time of review, scatter-paying online slots were burning white hot, with a number of developers having a crack at the format. Pragmatic Play was one of the trailblazers dropping games like Gates of Olympus, while others, such as Hacksaw Gaming, tossed Frank's Farm into the mix, as well as Blueprint Gaming's Rise of Atlantis, to name a few. In other words, players are pretty spoiled for choice when it comes to selecting a scatter-paying online slot. Why would they want to pick Milkshake XXXtreme over the others?

A few possible reasons. For one, it feels like a bounce back from the previous baked goods Cupcakes slot from NetEnt, which, while layering on a load of thematic frosting, struggled to completely satiate the sweet tooth. Perhaps not a revolutionary bounce back, but the increased winning potential of 7,100x the bet is more of an enticement than it was before. Putting the XXXtreme Spins part to the side, the game is actually fairly extreme in some ways, too. With no bonus round, the goal is simply to land as many scatter pay wins as possible, charge them with multipliers from filled Milkshakes and collect as sugary a win as possible. Since there aren't free spins, hitting the max win from one of these regular base game spins would actually be pretty, err, sweet, not to mention fairly extreme. As such, the odds of the max win occurring might make for interesting reading. That leaves the Xtreme Spins part, and like Starburst XXXtreme, it might pay to proceed with caution since at 95x a pop, the more exciting option might well hoover up a balance like it's taking part in a milkshake drinking race.

Shaking it all together, Milkshake XXXtreme was a neatly packaged game with thrills to offer the right person. Due to the less volatile math model, and drastically less winning potential, it sits on a different ledge from Starburst XXXtreme. No bad thing, necessarily, as it gives players a chance to dabble with XXXtreme spins in a theoretically more user-friendly environment (if they're careful) than its cosmic cousin.