Manimals

Manimals: Slot Overview

If online slots are any guide to go by, the future looks pretty bleak. You never really see slots depicting a world of tomorrow that's solved all of humanity's problems, which takes place on a planet devoid of pollution, war, poverty, inequality, and nuclear weapons, where we've thrown down our flags and prejudices to join hands as one species under god or science or whatever you believe in. Instead, it's all dystopic nightmares, of which Stakelogic's slot Manimals is another example.

In the world of Manimals, humankind has become extinct and genetic engineering has created an animal/human hybrid under the leadership of an entity known as Tigarius. In Manimals, players are tasked with battling through the streets and gutters for a showdown in a place known simply as the arena. Stakelogic's designers have brought the world to life in a game that looks a little like The Expendables slots but where the characters are genetic monstrosities rather than action heroes. The base game has a noir futuristic, cyberpunk, William Gibson appearance, all flashing neon and grit, where sharp claws or pointy jaws would be a major help in just staying alive, let alone attempting to thrive in this dog-eat-dog world.

As well as big characters, Manimals has a (potentially) big game board too. Reels, okay, there are 5 of those, but symbols can be squashed on them to produce up to 32,768 ways to win. Three feature buy options are on hand for players who like to skip the base game, as are bet levels of 20 c to $/€100 per spin. With a medium-high volatile math model running things on the back end, the default theoretical RTP value is 96.01%, and there is no mention of this figure changing when buying free spins or not.

Winning combinations pay left to right from the leftmost reel, and Manimals has ten regular paying symbols. Its least interesting ones are 10 to A card rank low pays, whereas its 5 high pays are the GM species of the tale. Hitting a winning combination of 5 matching royals pays you 0.4 to 1 times the bet, ratcheting up to 1.6-10 times the bet for hitting a 5 high pay winning way. In the base game, wild symbols help connect wins by substituting for any regular pay symbol, appearing on all but the leftmost reel. In free spins, however, wilds cannot appear on the second reel.

Manimals: Slot Features

Manimals' extras are 3 different kinds of Reel Modifiers: a free spins round where wilds are sticky and a buy feature.

Reel Modifiers

Reel Modifiers may land at random and replace reel symbols, though wilds and scatters cannot be substituted.

• Stacks – any of the top tier symbols replace 4 to 8 symbols in the base game or 4 to 16 symbols in free spins. At random, a gigantic reel symbol may drop in front of the grid during the spin then land on the reels. Expanded symbols can form a Mega Stack by filling a whole reel or an Epic Stack filling 2 connected reels.
• Quake – when this reel modifier lands in the game view, all low-value symbols are destroyed. It may occur after a spin and any wins. When triggered, all high-value symbols, scatters, or wilds drop to the bottom of the reel and a new set of symbols land in the grid matrix.
• Blaster Disaster – only available in the base game. A grenade symbol highlights the connecting symbol for destruction. The symbols are removed and replaced by new symbols. When a 1x1 symbol is destroyed, it is replaced by a stack of 2 symbols.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols are needed to trigger the free spins round. Hitting 3, 4, or 5 scatters awards 8, 10, or 15 free spins, respectively. It is possible to win additional free spins while the round is active. Also, any increased number of ways created from a winning outcome will be persistent. The wilds are persistent, too, and drop to the bottom of the reel, where they stay till the round ends. Note that wilds appear on reels 3, 4, and 5 in free spins, not on reel 2.

Buy Feature

Free spins can instantly be triggered from the base game by buying them. For 100x the bet you can get 8 free spins, 150x the bet gets you 10 free spins, while 200x the bet buys 15 free spins.

Manimals: Slot Verdict

Manimals might not be able to compare with the kings of the dystopic genre, your Nitropolis slots, for example, but it puts up a decent fight. Or an interesting fight, at least. The name is clever, for starters. Manimals = man + animals; it's one of those things you wonder why it hasn't been used before. Oop, a quick Google search turned up a TV show from the 1980s titled Manimal, where the protagonist, Jonathan Chase, could transform from human to any animal he liked, which he did to fight crime. One amusing anecdote from the show is that even after tearing off his 3 piece suit to transform into an animal such as a snake, panther, or hawk (amongst other things), when morphing back into his human form, his clothes were always fully intact, no matter his conscious state.

Ah, the 80s, it was a wild time, man, and Manimals has several elements which may be fired to get pretty wild itself. From three modifiers to a free spins round with sticky wilds. Shame multipliers don't poke their noses in at any point, yet the game has a lot of win ways for a 5-reel slot, especially considering full reel symbols are possible, and wilds, though restricted to the rightmost three reels in the bonus round, remain on the board till a free spins session ends. It's a system that's good for payouts of up to 5,000x the stake.

And yet, with the high number of ways Manimals can produce, alongside all those wild animals, sorry, Manimals, a higher ceiling amount than a 5Kx the bet was expected. In the end, Manimals could have been a wilder experience if Stakelogic had really cranked up the genetic modification, but as it stands, the gameplay has its moments, and the theme's relatively experimental, so the slot is worth a look if freaky visions of the future are a particular forte.