Description
Valley of the Gods, released by Yggdrasil Gaming in August 2017, takes an Ancient Egyptian theme and presents five rows across five reels and between 45 and a mahoosive 125 ways of winning. The graphics lend this game a mysterious feel, plus there’s great music that sounds as if it could provide the backing track for one of the Indiana Jones movies.
A pyramid stands guarded at its entrance by a pair of statues, the key deities Horus and Anubis. They stir to life to help you in your adventure, in which your mission is to zap the blockers to activate the wager-free respins and expand the grid. Once you’ve destroyed the blockers, feed the gods by gathering blue and red scarabs, to win extra lives and boost multipliers.
Equally, as ever, Valley of the Gods is every bit as visually stunning as you’d expect from this great operator.
How to play
Prices per spin kick-off at 25p a pop, rising to as much as £125 per go, and you can play on any device you wish, mobile or otherwise. All the Spin, Autoplay and Max Bet functions you’d expect to see are here.
When it comes to the game’s symbols, you’ll find Anubis (the god of the dead), Bastet (the cat goddess), Horus plus the boy king Tutankhamen. Horus and Anubis are the most lucrative of these, at 20x line bet or 500 coins for five of a kind.
The lower-paying hieroglyphs include the Cat, Bird, Eye of Ra and Snake, alongside a couple of others.
Win a payout on landing a minimum of three of the same icons on neighbouring reels, kicking off from the one furthest left.
You start the game with 45 ways of winning, and you’ll see a dozen golden scarab blockers, which do what their name suggests, blocking certain positions. Once you begin landing the right combos, the winning icons take the blockers away, creating more possibilities to win, up to a maximum of 3,125. You’ll also launch both scarab collections.
Special features
Special symbols
Keep an eye out for the scarabs – the blue ones enhance your multiplier, while the red symbols supply additional lives when playing for free respins. (There are no Wilds or Scatters here.)
Bonus features
Respins
Activate this once you’ve landed yourself a winning combo – and enjoy a free respin. This carries on for as long as you keep winning. But land a non-winning spin and the blockers come back, so you return to square one.
Scarabs
The kindly Anubis raises the multiplier by a factor of one for every five blue scarabs gathered. Horus is the collector of red scarabs, granting an extra life as soon as this feature is active. That means you can immediately enjoy one additional respin following a non-winning one. For every five red scarabs you ‘feed’ Horus, your reward is one additional life.
The red scarabs come from winning orange, purple, red and pink icons, their blue counterparts from winning blue, green or teal icons.
Jackpot
Unfortunately, there is no progressive jackpot in the Valley of the Gods. However, the top non-progressive prize is a tidy 1,500x stake.
Return to Player (RTP)
RTP or Return to Player is a perfectly decent 96.2%, and you’re likely to find a procession of smaller wins here, with perhaps the occasional bigger haul in this medium-volatility offering. The hit rate is just under one in four at 22.8%.
Verdict
We all know how common Ancient Egypt is as a slot game theme. But Valley of the Gods is well thought out, with some intriguing features, and it’s more likely to make you want to pack your virtual bags and head to the pyramids than some. What’s more, it offers some cracking winning potential.
Take Valley of the Gods for a spin today – and let us know what you reckoned.
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