Money Train 5 Slot Review

The Money Train series has always chased bigger numbers. The fourth game hit a massive 150,000x the bet and claimed to be the final stop. Relax Gaming brought the train back anyway, but the fifth game actually lowers the ceiling. It tops out at 50,000x in Standard mode, and Ultra mode doubles that to 100,000x.

What you get in exchange for the smaller cap is the best bonus round the series has built. The 5x4 grid with 40 fixed paylines and a 96.10% RTP is highly volatile, but the reels are just a formality. The whole game revolves around the free spins feature, where a train crawls along a station ladder unlocking better versions of its own symbols.

Wins pay left to right across 40 lines that you cannot switch off, and the paytable is deliberately small. The best symbol is a bowler-hatted boss with a cigar, paying 20x the bet for five in a row. The other characters pay between 8x and 10x, while the card suits sit at the bottom paying 3x to 5x. On a game reaching for 50,000x, those base payouts barely matter.

Boards that look promising often pay nothing. Eight character symbols spread across five reels do not form a line unless they start in the right column. The one thing that can rescue a base spin is the Nuclear Wild. Crosshairs lock onto up to five reels and plant bombs that detonate into full-reel wilds four positions tall.

There is a catch written into the rule for those wilds, and it matters. The bombs only expand when they are part of a winning combination. A screen full of planted bombs that connect to nothing simply does not go off, meaning the base game can stay quiet for a long time.

The entire game is built around a sideways movement mechanic. Ticket symbols carry a number, dictating how many steps the reels shunt from right to left. Every reel pushed off the left edge advances the train one station and dumps its entire value into the total win. Tickets always act last, after everything else on the board has done its job.

Four stations gate the best features. Station 5 unlocks persistent symbols that fire their effect on every subsequent spin. Station 10 opens a fifth row to widen the board, giving every effect more targets to reach. Station 15 unlocks the Bomber and the Pyromancer, while Station 20 switches on the Permanent Payer. Before hitting station 5, every special modifier you land is just a weak, one-shot version of itself.

This sideways movement cuts both ways. A persistent Collector parked on the leftmost reel compounds value on every single spin. When a ticket lands and the grid shunts, that reel goes over the edge. Its banked value gets added to the total, but the engine that was growing it disappears.

Three or more bonus symbols open the free spins round, replacing the base game with dark reels and empty sockets. It is a familiar collect-and-hold setup where you get three spins, and every symbol that lands sticks while resetting the counter. Nothing pays until the spins run out, and then the whole board is added up at once.

Triggering symbols reveal a value between 1x and 10x the bet, and then twelve named characters can land on top of them. The Payer reveals a multiplier and adds it to everything else, while the Sniper doubles between three and eight symbols. The Bomber multiplies everything visible by 2x, 3x, 4x, or 5x. The Collector sweeps every visible value into its own, and the Collector Payer does the same before paying its new total back out to its targets.

The weirder symbols change the board completely. The Necromancer revives spent specials, and the Arms Dealer converts ordinary bonus symbols into active features. The Pyromancer burns a static Hot Zone into the train that doubles anything inside it, while the Ticket Master violently adds your entire running total to every other symbol. You also have to watch out for the Absorber, which eats all the ordinary bonus symbols and removes them.

One vital rule ties the cast together. Specials act in reading order, from top to bottom and left to right, with the Permanent Payer acting second-last and tickets last. Where a symbol lands decides whether it collects from a boosted board or a bare one. A round that lands no new symbols changes nothing, burns a spin, and brings the feature closer to a quiet end.

The 50,000x ceiling belongs to the bonus round, and any entry method can technically reach it. If the sum of all values on the board hits that cap, the round ends and pays out. A cheaper entry plays for the exact same maximum as an expensive one, but it lacks a head start.

A head start means everything because the station ladder is where the massive numbers hide. A round that stalls early leaves you with a board of x1 and x2 coins and a few one-shot specials. Reaching station 20 brings persistent symbols, an extra row, a Hot Zone, and a Permanent Payer. The ceiling requires getting deep enough into the stations that the symbols start feeding each other.

There is one free shortcut built into the trigger. If a Ticket Master is among the symbols that start the round, the train jumps straight to station 15 before the first spin. That skips you right past persistence and the extra row, dropping you directly at the Bomber and Pyromancer gate.

The Supercharge button opens six different purchases. Free Spins cost 100x the bet, Ultra Free Spins are 250x, Super Free Spins are 500x, and Ultra Super Free Spins are 2,000x. The two Super entries start you at station 15 to justify the massive price tag. There are also Bonus Reels at 10x and Ultra Bonus Reels at 25x, which strip out paying symbols for a heavily raised chance of a natural trigger.

The four Free Spins buys run at 96.50%, sitting higher than the 96.10% for an ordinary spin. A buy usually costs you return on other games, but here it actually bumps it up. You can also play the Enhanced Spin ante bet for 50% more on your stake to double the chance of a natural trigger, though it keeps the same 96.10% math.

Ultra mode is a strange toggle on the side of the screen. It costs nothing to switch on, keeps the same stake and RTP, and doubles the maximum win to 100,000x. Every purchase also gains a pricier Ultra counterpart to match that doubled ceiling.

The wild west train robbery has been dragged into an irradiated wasteland. The sky is yellow-green, refinery stacks smoke in the background, and the reels sit in the flank of an armoured locomotive. The card suits are made of cold enamelled metal, reading instantly as filler, while the characters are warm hand-painted portraits.

The bonus round swaps into brass coin discs with glowing cyan faces and named slabs in bright colors. It is a colder, quieter screen than the base game, letting the values do the talking. The vocabulary really sells the theme here, using terms like Ticket Master, Bomber, and Pyromancer instead of generic feature names.

A bonus round lives or dies on how far up the station ladder it climbs. Everything worth having sits behind station 5, and plenty of rounds simply never get there. When they do, the interplay is superb. Watching a Sniper double what a Payer just raised, before a Collector sweeps it all up and a ticket shunts the reels closer to the Bomber, is brilliant slot design. Anyone who loved the complex symbol interactions in the previous games gets a deeper, smarter version of exactly that here, even with a smaller maximum win.