It was no surprise that the new Vulcan slot from RTG would be a high variance affair. Any time you see something like 30x bet multipliers or the amazing 500x multipliers advertised for Feature Guarantee free spins in this game, you know that you are probably in for a whipping. We just had no idea how brutal that beating would be. 100x worse than a game with 5x line multipliers? At least! This is a game for straight thinking, thick-skinned people with deep pockets. Vulcan can make you the happiest player in cyber-casino-land or it can rip your guts out.

Your gambling starts with how much you deposit and bet. When you open the game you have already been granted a random chance at the Feature Guarantee. It is certain to trigger somewhere between 26 and 250 spins from that fateful moment, and you have no way of knowing when until you are 25 spins from a sure thing. That is when the lightning bolts crash and the game announces that you will certainly get free spins within 25 more attempts. You know nothing, and have no chance to trigger the Feature until you are within 25 spins. Exciting isn’t it? Thinking about the re-triggers that escalate that 3x multiplier for every free game all the way up to 500 times your bet every spin?

Don’t get too excited, now is a time to reflect and make decisions. Do NOT go to the cashier to add more money to make sure you can survive those 25 spins. You will lose the Feature Guarantee. You have to settle in, chew your sleeve and spin until the last possible moment. Then and only then press the button to trigger your chance at the feature if the Gods of Fire have not graced you yet. With hope, this issue of losing progress if you leave the game to refill your balance is a technical issue that will be resolved, and not a feature of the game. Either way, be forewarned.

Back to the volatility issue now because you will have to take that into account when you decide how much to bet on this lovable/hate-able machine. In fact you have to take it into account before you deposit! The risk factor is so high in this game that the (assumed) 96% RTP has no bearing on the deposit to stake ratio for this game. You may go 20 spins without getting a single line bet + FG bet back in one spin. It is that merciless. Rarely the conservative when it comes to gambling, this game simply scares me and I would suggest betting no more than 1/250 of your starting bankroll on this bad boy.

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. We are not dealing with some blind random number generator married to a static 3-reel slot here with varying symbol counts on each reel, this is a complicated game. The maths are absolutely brilliant and although the RNG is certainly uncaring, the maths are simply brutal. Just like most Feature Guarantee slots made for RTG by Dynamite Games you do not want to do certain things. In this game you certainly don’t want to reduce your line count below 25 willy-nilly. That will disable the guarantee! Your only hope at this point if you have over-bet is to lower the number of lines staked (temporarily disabling the FG) in hopes of building up your bankroll – we don’t suggest it, but had to do it before we understood the risks. Then, if unsuccessful, take your chances by challenging the trigger. Just press PLAY in the upper right.

Hail Mary

Hail Mary

You also do not want to mess around with raising and lowering your bet unless you know precisely what you are doing. I would suggest keeping a pad open to record any wins, however small, and never raise your stake more than your current winnings. Do not chase this feature! You already gambled enough simply opening the game. Now is the time for steadfast hammering, 1/250th of your starting bankroll at a time. Of course there is no guarantee that the feature will pay well, but you at least want a chance. And it only makes sense that if you lose your progress while the feature is active, you will draw a new number between 26 and 250 if you have to go fill up your balance when the feature is not active.

Now for the good news. It only takes three scatters to trigger free spins, subsequent re-triggers add multipliers and even if you never see the Feature Guarantee you will have a shot at your line bets being worth 300x as much (as opposed to 500x in the FG). Also, for any times you were ahead of the game and sensibly increased your bet size your bet size was being ‘recorded’ and FG games will be paid out at an average of your bet per line since the last reset. And lastly, although you can see Vulcan expand to fill reels 2 and 4 in the base game, no matter how you get to the free spins he can fill reels 2, 3, 4, and 5 from top to bottom during free games.

RTG or Dynamite Games, have up until this game, capped winnings for any spin or feature at 50,000x line bet. That is a terrible thing when you have expanding wilds and multipliers in action as the game simply stops paying you when you win $50,000 when betting $1.00 per line. Players have tried to work around that, taking already super-high variance games and making them even riskier by raising their bet per line and decreasing number of lines bet. Someone, someday will feel the max cash-out pain without a bonus on this game but the limit has been increased to 150,000x so even the most conservative RTG casinos (max bet $1.00 per line) have tripled their payout maximums and that is good news.

You can find our basic review of Vulcan Slots from RealTime Game in the Online World Casino Directory along with places to play. If you want to talk about this, or other games, the WCD Forums are open as well.