Helios - Triple Sun Slot Review

Pragmatic Play is back in familiar Greek mythology territory with Helios - Triple Sun, another scatter-pays tumble slot. If you've played games like Sweet Bonanza or Gates of Olympus, you already know the basics here. However, what actually makes Helios worth talking about is how its three specific modifiers work together once you get into the bonus round.

Getting into the free spins can be a bit of a tease. A sun scatter will randomly fly to the top of the board, but there's no actual meter to fill. It triggers when it triggers, and counting the collected suns won't get you there any faster.

If you don't want to wait for a natural trigger, you have a few options. You can turn on the Ante Bet (paying 50% more per spin for a better chance to trigger it naturally), or you can just buy the bonus. The standard buy costs 80x your bet and gives you eight free spins with up to three random modifiers. If you're feeling lucky, you can shell out 200x for the "Super" round, which guarantees all three modifiers are active from the start.

The bonus round is entirely defined by which colored suns you get:

• The Yellow Sun: This instantly unlocks the top row on the middle four reels. It expands your grid from 30 to 34 symbols for the whole feature, making it much easier to hit scatter-pays.
• The Red Sun: This drops multiplier bombs ranging from 2x up to 100x. They stick around during a spin's tumbles and apply to your final win for that spin.
• The Blue Sun: This is the most interesting one. It introduces a persistent multiplier that goes up by +1x with every single tumble and never resets. If you hit a dead spin, the blue multiplier just waits patiently and applies its full strength to your next winning sequence.

When the Red and Blue modifiers show up on the same spin, the game adds them together rather than multiplying them.

I bought both bonuses, and it was a great reminder of how volatile slots can be, even at medium volatility.

I went big and bought the 200x Super round. On my sixth spin, a tiny 1x win combined with a 6x persistent blue multiplier and a 17x red multiplier. The game added the 6 and 17 together for a 23x payout. That single spin was the highlight of the round, and my 200x investment returned a pretty disappointing 36x my bet.

My 80x standard buy wasn't much better. I only got the yellow and blue suns, hit six dead spins out of eight, and walked away with 12x. You can retrigger by landing another sun inside the bonus, which adds three extra spins and can activate a missing modifier, but I didn't get lucky there.

If this expanding grid feels familiar, it is. Pragmatic has used it before on Wisdom of Athena and Kadita Ocean Fury. But Helios gets there differently.

For example, instead of Kadita's slow, block-by-block grid expansion, the yellow sun here opens the top row instantly. The trade-off is that Kadita lets you bank multipliers even on dead spins, whereas in Helios, if a red multiplier lands on a non-winning board, it's completely wasted.

Helios - Triple Sun is a solid, slightly more relaxed alternative to the studio's heavyweight titles. It caps out at a 5,000x max win (a far cry from the 25,000x potential of Gates of Olympus 2500) and dials the volatility down to medium, while offering a very respectable 96.46% RTP.

It's not going to reinvent the scatter-pays genre. But if you like this format and want a smoother ride where the excitement relies on building up a persistent multiplier for one massive tumble, it's definitely worth a few spins.