Gold Hit: Lil Demon Slot by Playtech

Line wins are almost an afterthought. Five Lil Devils pay a touch under 4x, and the horseshoe, dice, bells and BAR that head the paytable land somewhere around 1.8x to 4x for a full row of five. The old fruit-machine icons are decoration. What you actually play for are the coins.

Cash Prize Coins each carry a printed cash value. Special Prize Coins hold one of four fixed jackpots, Mini 20x, Minor 50x, Major 200x and Mega 500x. The Collect All Coin does the obvious thing: it sweeps up every prize locked on the reels and pays the combined total. Under the base-game Gold Hit lock these coins stick for at least three spins, and each fresh one refreshes the hold. Fill a full reel with coins and you take everything on it. That's where the odd shape earns its place: the reels stand 4, 4, 6, 6 and 8 symbols tall from left to right, so packing that eight-high reel on the right needs far more coins than the short ones on the left.

The red demon himself, grinning with dollar signs for eyes, can butt in at random. His feature might toss extra Cash or Special coins onto the reels, add diamond Bonus symbols toward a trigger, or drop a Collect All coin straight onto the board.

Three, four or five Bonus symbols award 10, 12 or 15 Free Games. Now the coins lock for the whole round instead of three spins, and completing a reel spins a wheel that multiplies every prize sitting on it by up to x10. Stacking a tall reel full during that phase is the real payday.

Two upsells hover over all of it. A Feature Bet raises your odds of triggering the Free Games for a larger stake, and a Buy Feature just hands you the round. Neither is unusual for Playtech now, but with the line pays this thin, the game leans hard on funneling you into the bonus one way or another, bought or not. It all plays out in a daft cartoon fiery underworld of molten orange rock and heaped gold coins, the little devil cackling off to one side, more mischief than menace.