Cash Defense

Cash Defense: Slot Overview

One of the neat things about the internet is being able to fire up an aggregator site like bored.com to freely play a game or two. Bored.com might have gone, but one popular online game for whiling away a bit of time then as now is Bloons TD. In this one, hordes of balloons snake around a path while your job is to erect towers and other defense mechanisms to pop as many of them as possible. It starts out pretty easy, but the balloons progressively get faster, bigger, and harder to pop. Good times, and if you like the TD concept, here's an online slot that may suit too - namely Cash Defense which comes from software designer Print Studios.

Instead of popping 'bloons' in Cash Defense, it's the players' task to defend the land from an alien bug infestation. And by the land, we mean a rolling hilled country covered in towers bristling with weapons ready to be fired upon any baddy who dares to come near. In atmosphere, Cash Defense is arguably close to Holy Hand Grenade due to the mediaeval references, but there are faint echoes of Royal Potato as well as Pine of Plinko, in parts. The sweeping soundtrack provides a marching off-to-war feel, putting keen players in the mood for popping some balloons, or bugs, as the case may be.

Cash Defense allows several ways of going about the business of bug squashing. One is by staking 10 p/c to $/€20 per paid game round and trying your luck. The others are three feature bet options. Medium-high volatile, when played regularly, Cash Defense comes with an RTP of 96.29%, while the Feature Bet has three different values depending on the option chosen. The action itself is played out on a 5-reel, 4-row panel, with 26 paylines for landing winning combinations of 3 to 5 OAK across.

Winning lines pay from left to right, beginning from the leftmost side of the board. Print Studios has seen fit to name all 10 bug pay symbols, which from low to high, are known as Dropax, Hornax, Bublax, Rhinax, Steve, Alan, Mantisa, Scythra, Psykrona, and Mentarch. They are a creative bunch; gotta give them that, and values range from 1.5 to 50 times the bet for a 5-symbol winning line.

Cash Defense: Slot Features

Cash Defense does not have regular wild symbols as such, but it does have a set of unique features, including SuperSpinners and various Tower Defense features. Let's take a closer look...

SuperSpinners

SuperSpinners randomly appear between symbols on the reels with multiplier values allocated to them. If a winning line passes through active SuperSpinners, it is multiplied by the applicable values.

Tower Defense Features

There are 2 TD Features in Cash Defense players can trigger - the Mini TD feature and the Grand TD feature. In both, towers are used to eliminate enemies moving along a pathway. Arrow towers are good for eliminating single enemies, while Cannon towers are good at eliminating groups of enemies. Eliminated enemies award special features.

Mini TD Feature

Landing the Mini TD symbol on the rightmost reel triggers the Mini TD feature, which is played in two parts:

• Part 1 - During the first part of this feature, 2 random towers shoot their weapons at 1 wave of 10 enemies and a Bonus enemy. Eliminating the Bonus enemy triggers the Grand TD Bonus.
• Part 2 – 1 spin is awarded with a Jumbo symbol covering reels 2 and 3, which substitutes for all eliminated symbol enemies. These eliminated enemies are displayed on the Jumbo symbol.

Grand TD Bonus

This one is either won from the Mini TD feature or from the base game when 3 or more scatters symbols land in view. Landing 4 or 5 scatters also awards 20x or 100x the bet, respectively. The Grand TD Bonus is also played in 2 parts.

• Part 1 – Players choose a tower configuration, and a wave of 10 enemies rolls through for the towers to attempt to eliminate. If at least 5 are eliminated, a second wave of 50 SuperSpinner enemies takes place.
• Part 2 – 3 spins are awarded with a Jumbo symbol covering reels 2, 3, and 4. The Jumbo symbols substitutes for all symbol enemies eliminated in Part 1. Also, for each SuperSpinner enemy eliminated in Part 1, a randomly selected SuperSpinners' multiplier is increased by 1 before each spin.

Feature Bet

The Feature Bet lets players activate three additional ways of playing Cash Defense. These are:

• Scatter Boost – 1.5x the bet to increase the chances of landing scatters, RTP 96.64%.
• Mini TD feature for 28.9x the bet, RTP 96.83%.
• Grand TF feature for 94x the bet, RTP 97.33%.

Cash Defense: Slot Verdict

If memory serves, on Bloons TD, you could construct a giant golden statue that would unleash a powerful barrage to annihilate masses of balloons, even those massive zeppelins which lumber about the path taking a huge number of hits to bring down. If you happened to have an employer who didn't mind a bit of Tower Defending in the office, even better, as the game has major replayability. Cash Defense also possesses a solid level of replayability as well. SuperSpinners, a staple Print Studios device, are there to keep the base game rolling along, which is good because triggering bonus rounds organically wasn't the easiest thing in the world. But, the Scatter Boost is there to potentially speed the process along, as are the two other straight feature buys, boasting handsome RTP values to boot.

Once activated, The Tower Defense rounds are where Cash Defense really flexes its originality. Here you get to sit back and cross your fingers that the towers are going to take down as many enemies as possible. Naturally, the deeper you can go into the round, the more exciting the second part is going to be, where the more enemies you can get on the Jumbo Symbol, the better the spins are theoretically likely to turn out. Results ranged from cruel bonus rounds where nothing was eliminated, so nothing appeared on the Jumbo symbol, to the scenario where the second wave had been unleashed and eliminated SuperSpinner enemies led to additional multipliers on each Part 2 spin. Kinda fun, and kinda potent, too, with wins of up to a cap of 20,000x the bet a possibility. Make no mistake, though, eliminating more than 3 enemies could be exceedingly tough work.

Naturally, something so new won't appeal to all gambler tastes. It might be a too gimmicky for some and too much of a step away from what many consider a slot should be. Those who haven't played a regular tower defense game might not be so warm to Cash Defense's methods. Even those who are familiar with the pattern might have appreciated some way of levelling up, being about to 'buy' extra towers perhaps to help them in future bonus rounds. Just thinking out loud, really, because however you cut it, Cash Defense is a unique Print Studios production, so kudos to that. It might not be as out there as something like Reapers, but Cash Defense is another release that pushes at the boundaries of what an online slot can do.