Musketeer Megaways

Musketeer Megaways Richelieu Riches: Slot Overview

The Three Musketeers is a famous novel written by French author Alexandre Dumas in 1844 that recounts the tale of D'Artanan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos getting up to all sorts of brave, heroic deeds. Set in the 1620s, The Three Musketeers might be an adventure story, but it also gave Dumas a chance to highlight questionable elements of the Ancien Regime, and it was published four years before the 1848 French Revolution led violently to the Second Republic.

Enough of the European Lit lesson and on with the show. Musketeer Megaways Richelieu Riches comes from developer iSoftBet as an addition to their Twisted Tales range of slots. This one not only brings the four adventures to the reels, it makes each one of them the highest paying symbol. How it does this is by allowing the game to be tackled in two ways. One is called All4One mode and is played on four individual game windows at the same time. The other is 1ForAll mode and is played on just one reel-set. Things mix and match when free spins trigger - we'll get to them in a mo.

First, let's take in the scene, which is very woody. Wood surrounds the 6-reel Megaways game grids and has been used to construct the quaint background scene. Presumably, this is Paris back in the day, before Art Nouveau arrived or Baron Haussmann renovated massive swaths of the city. It all looks very Twisted Tales, even a bit Peter & Sons, with a high drama soundtrack to match.

Players can switch between All4One or 1ForAll at any time in the base game, altering the RTP in the process. Using one game window comes with a return value of 95.517%, whereas the four window option is slightly higher at 96%. The volatility remains the same at medium/high throughout. Stakes change too - 20 p/c to $/€20 when spinning one standard game grid, increasing to 50 p/c to $/€50 for the four grid selection.

All game windows contain 6 reels, holding up to 7 symbols each. The exact number changes on every spin, creating up to 117,649 ways to win. The grids have a name written at the top of them, indicating which symbol is the highest paying premium. This could be Richelieu, D'Artagnan, Porthos, Athos, or Aramis, worth 50x the standard bet for six of a kind. Beneath the character symbols are hats, coin bags, and scrolls as the other three premiums, paying out 2-10x for six of a kind. The rest of the tiles are 9-A royals; these ones will get you 0.7 to 1.5x for a six-symbol winning way. Rounding off this section is the wild symbol, landing on reels 2, 3, 4, or 5 to substitute any regular symbol.

Musketeer Megaways Richelieu Riches: Slot Features

The two game modes have their own free spins bonus round, which have more commonalities than differences. As well, players get cascades, mystery symbols, a Lose to Win Modifier, Max Megaways, and bonus guarantees.

Mystery Symbols

Starting with an easy one, mystery symbols land with a windmill imprinted on them. All mystery symbols in view transform into the same regular pay symbol.

Cascading Wins

Every winning combination starts the cascading wins feature, which removes winning symbols from the reels and replaces them with new symbols. Cascades keep on going until no new wins are formed.

1ForAll Game Mode

Playing in this mode comes with a couple of random modifiers not available in All4One mode. One is the Lose to Win feature, where any spin can trigger it, guaranteeing a feature trigger or a reel win. Another is Max Megaways, triggering randomly on any paid spin in this mode. When activated, each reel lands 7 symbols, forcing the maximum number of Megaways to be available.

Landing 4 bonus symbols triggers 5 free spins. You also get +1 free spin for each extra bonus symbol in view, up to a maximum of 7 free spins. Here, four separate game grids are used during 1ForAll free spins, each one having its own unlimited multiplier. These multipliers start on x1 and rise by +1 after winning cascades. Multipliers apply to their respective game grid only.

All4One Game Mode

This is the mode played on four reel sets in the base game, and unlike 1ForAll does not have the secondary modifier features. What you want is to land 4 bonus symbols on the same game grid to trigger 5 free spins. As above, additional bonus symbols add 1 free spin up to 7. The rules of free spins are the same, except now, when a special All4One symbol lands in all four reel sets, all multipliers take the value of the highest multiplier.

Bonus Guarantee

If you end either bonus round with less than a 10x win, you get 3 extra free spins to play This can be triggered once.

Musketeer Megaways Richelieu Riches: Slot Verdict

Musketeer Megaways Richelieu Riches combines a theme and gaming ideas that aren't new, yet aren't overly abundant either. Quad grids are an acquired taste, as they haven't exactly become a mainstream trick in developers' tool kits just yet. It might've been nice to see more of four heroes in the game, too, but they've been cleverly assigned their own grid, which personalises everything and ties in nicely with the four game window concept. Another nice touch is giving players 1ForAll mode if they're interested in the quad screens in free spins but don't want to pay a higher stake, while others get All4One to go nuts with all those extra reels and ways.

With the extra modifiers and the lower spin cost, you might think 1ForAll us the obvious choice. Interestingly, we had better results with All4One. Not only is the RTP slightly better, the All4One symbol increasing all win multipliers to the highest value could be very helpful in free spins. If you thought winning 6 initial free spins was a tad low, it wasn't an issue in practice. For one, you get the chance to win on four windows on each spin, and the way winning cascades are dealt with one at a time can stretch a bonus round. By the end of a spin, tidy wins could rack up accrue. Max those Musketeers out, and the game is capable of dishing out wins of up to 19,507x the bet (All4One) or 33,980x in (1ForAll).

These four grid games can come across as more gimmicky than functional and won't be to everyone's taste. iSoftBet has made a good one, though, that gels well with the characters, has a swashbuckling spirit and served up entertaining spin sequences where the quad grid setup felt more like a benefit than an unnecessary technicality.