Mayan Gods Slot Review
Released in February 2019, this game can be played at online casinos such as LeoVegas, Rizk or Mr Green.
Theme and basic information
Mayan Gods comes with an unusual theme. Whilst the Maya/Aztec/Inca theme is quite popular among slot developers, we almost always get it in some sort of adventure or adventurer slot and it almost always plays in the jungle or in a temple or in a temple in a jungle.
Not so Mayan Gods. We are in a green landscape, but there’s no temple anywhere and Mayan Gods re-imagines the classic theme with a new take: UFOs. As in, what if the Mayan Gods were actually aliens? We see neither gods nor aliens here, but UFOs make an appearance here and there.
It’s interesting, unusual and really good-looking. Red Tiger Gaming made a great-looking slot here and it adds half the fun when playing.
The symbols are a bit more unusual as well. We get a sun as the most valuable symbol, paying out 500 coins for 5 on a payline. The bird of prey pays out 72 coins for such a win. The pyramid (?) pays out 56 coins for 5 of a kind and meteor still pays out 40 coins. The low-value symbols here represent the elements, showing fire, water, wind, earth (or a leaf) and also what appears to be lightning.
The backdrop is a green valley and artefacts that have an alien feel to them. It all looks great and the background sounds and music are appropriate as well.
You can play this game from 0.20 to 10.00, making it suitable for the budget conscious.
Avalanche wins and multipliers
Curiously, slots with this theme almost always come with the avalanche feature. Meaning, winning combinations explode off the reels and make way for new symbols from above and potentially more wins.
Such cascading wins are often (but not always) accompanied by increasing multipliers. Those multipliers only increase on consecutive wins, however. As it is, pay attention to the totem on the right-hand side, where multipliers start appearing on your second consecutive win. They’re added at the end of a winning series and reset on a loss.
Alas, we’ve rarely seen more than a 3x multiplier, though in theory more is definitely possible.
Four random features
There are no free spins in this game and no bonus game as such. Instead, we get four features that are randomly triggered. On any spin, it can suddenly turn night and a special symbol will drop onto the reels, hailing the arrival of one of the following four features:
- Mayan King – A 2×2 symbol will drop on the reels where it becomes a wild; it can also add further wilds to the reels in random positions
- Mayan Eclipse – Another 2×2 symbol which transforms itself and other symbols on the reels into the same symbol
- Mayan UFO – A UFO flies across the reels to remove all low-value symbols
- Mayan Shaman – Increases the multiplier and then removes all symbols for a re-spin
We generally saw one of these features at least once every 50 spins, but sometimes more often.
Conclusion: A cool slot that never gets boring but can get frustrating
The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of Mayan Gods is 96.11%, which is only average value. And in fact, it usually feels like that. This is a volatile slot and wins are infrequent. Getting an increased multiplier is also a rare occurrence, especially one that’s bigger than 3x. Big wins are so rare, at least in our experience, that they will not boost your budget significantly.
The game is definitely entertaining with those four random features. You never know what you get and that’s half the fun. But the slot can be so frustrating even when you budget carefully that you will eventually move onto something more reliable, where a big hit might be on the horizon. Even the bigger wins we experienced didn’t do enough to keep us going for long.