Artefacts: Vault of Fortune Slot Review
Released in July 2020, this game can be played at online casinos such as LeoVegas, Rizk or Casumo.
Theme and general information
If you’ve ever fancied becoming a master thief, Artefacts: Vault of Fortune presumably tells you how. Well, that’s the premise anyway as we head into a storage area (or vault) of some grand museum or some such. Security measures seem to be on the light side here, which doesn’t make the job of thieving overly difficult.
Vault of Fortune gives us the atmospheric scenery we know and love from Yggdrasil Gaming, though the whole thing is not quite as sophisticated as we’ve seen in other slots. Still, the lights are low in the warehouse behind the reels where crates are stacked, and various precious items are scattered around.
Since it’s our job to steal the most precious goods, let’s look at the symbols and their payouts. The low value items are card suits that have been made into precious necklace pendants. The high values are a Faberge egg, a Ming vase, an Egyptian cat statue and what is likely the Crown of England. It’s all quite nicely done, and the high and low value symbols even match in colour.
The Crown is obviously the most valuable item and pays 25x our stake for five of its kind. The Faberge egg follows with 20x our stake, whilst the cat statue and the vase are each worth 15x our stake for such a win.
The wild symbol is golden and has a lever that comes into play during the features. The scatter is a cryptex.
You can play this game from 0.10 to 100.00 per spin.
Dropdown feature with climbing multipliers and expanding wilds
In this game we get the Dropdown feature, which results in climbing multipliers if we manage to land consecutive wins. The dropdown is done particularly nice here as winning symbols are crushed by new symbols falling in from above.
The multiplier climbs on the left-hand side, though it resets on a non-winning spin.
Additionally, the wild can help create further wins, especially when it does become part of a winning combination itself. In that case, the lever is pulled and the wild expands across the whole reel, remaining in place whilst the other winning symbols are crushed and replaced.
It’s worth noting that these wilds actually expand to six symbols high (though the reels are only 4 symbols high). This means that the wilds drop down on the next spin, still covering the reels more or less fully. They keep doing that until no further wins are achieved.
Free spins with unlimited multipliers that can be retriggered
There isn’t much more to add to the features when it comes to the free spins. We need 3, 4 or 5 scatters to get 8, 12 or 20 free spins. The base game features continue to work the same way that they have, except now the multiplier that climbs on consecutive wins won’t reset on a losing spin.
It is also possible to retrigger the free spins by collecting more scatters. That means you can get 8, 12 or 20 more free spins as long as you keep getting the corresponding number of free spins.
Verdict: A thoroughly entertaining slot that has decent potential
The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) for Artefacts: Vault of Fortune is 96.2%, which is above average and good for a slot with medium to high volatility. The hit rate is just under 20%, which we can live with. Wins don’t seem to be elusive here and the dropdown mechanic works nicely.
Artefacts: Vault of Fortune doesn’t reinvent the wheel, though we do like how winning symbols are crushed. None of the features are exactly ground-breaking, but the game is fun to play, nonetheless.
It never got boring and the free spins didn’t take forever to trigger either. The expanding wild can deliver decent results and whilst we don’t know how we would get to 11,000x our stake in wins anytime soon, it’s still fun to try.