Kingdoms Rise: Reign of Ice Slot by Playtech

The Hammer Respins are the reason to load this one up. A frozen hammer wild only ever lands on reel 2, and the second it shows, every wild already on the board locks in place. Then the fighters go to work. Each red-bearded barbarian and white-haired valkyrie on screen swings at that hammer, trying to crack it out of its casing of ice, and every hammer they knock free gets collected along a four-step ladder in the corner. Those freed hammers multiply any win they take part in by x1, x2, x3 or x5. Respins keep firing as long as hammers are still being released, and the round only closes once the last collected hammer has been spent. No fixed spin count, so a good run can keep feeding itself.

Two separate wilds drive that. The glowing trident medallion is the ordinary wild, landing on reels 3, 4 and 5 and substituting for everything. The ice-encased hammer on reel 2 counts as a wild too while it sits there waiting to be smashed loose. Both stand out against a glacial cavern of towering blue and violet ice crystals, with a silver reel border and a red map scroll tucked off to the side.

What separates this from a standard Playtech respin slot is the Kingdoms Rise Shop. Tokens drop onto symbols at random on any spin and get banked. You then spend them in the shop, and here's the part that matters: you're not just rebuying this game's Hammer Respins. The shop stocks features pulled from other titles in the Kingdoms Rise franchise, things like Valkyrie Respins, Wild Vortex and The Barbarian, all bought from the same token pile. There's no single buy button with a set price. Everything runs through that shared currency, which means your progress here carries the franchise's wider metagame with it.

Over the top sit three Kingdoms Rise progressive jackpots. They're pooled across the whole franchise rather than this one game, and any spin can hit one at random, with a larger bet improving the odds. The biggest seeds at around 100,000. Base play caps at 1,500x, and the jackpots pay separately on top of that figure, so the ceiling you see in the specs isn't the real limit if one of the progressives lands.