It’s surreal to believe that real people on Earth are investigating the potential of asteroid mining. Getting the resources from an asteroid would require finding it, shooting a rocket at it, setting up mining equipment, extracting the valuables, and finally returning them to Earth. Maybe construct a shopping center or something. Are we already so far down the road of depleting earth’s resources that a massive undertaking like this would be worthwhile? Maybe not, considering how unfashionable the concept is right now, but the fact that people are even considering it says a lot.
Finally, we get at Space Miners, a video slot game developed by Relax Gaming, a company currently owned by Kindred. The odd little Reactoonz-looking fellas have no issues going where no man has gone before – for minerals – if humans aren’t interested in doing the mining in space and our technology isn’t up to the task yet. As the cosmos slowly cycles through destruction and rebirth, the audience is seated on what appears to be an asteroid covered in mining equipment. The vista is incredibly pleasant, accentuated wonderous by a background of nebulaic vapors.
One of the most notable features of Space Miners is the sheer volume of possible outcomes. In fact, the 6×3 panel of active symbols generates 729 opportunities to win at the beginning of each paid gaming round. However, clearing off the barrier tiles in your immediate vicinity and expanding your grid can provide up to a million permutations. It’s a wild trip to get there, and the grid doesn’t reset between spins in the bonus round to make things even more exciting than they already are. Space Miners has a return to player percentage of 96.47% and may be played with wagers as low as 10 cents and as much as £/€20.
Five alien symbols make up the majority of the higher value tiles, paying anything from 0.6 to 5 times the bet for six of a kind. The lower-paying symbols are the four crystal gem items, with payouts of 0.4x the stake for six of a kind. The crystal box acts as a wild, appearing on any reel to replace other symbols (including pay symbols). When a reel is hit by a wild, the wild will expand to fill the entire reel.
Slot Bonus Rounds for Space Miners
Space Miners, as alluded to above, clear the way for more symbols and more opportunities to win by removing tiles that might otherwise stand in the way. In the form of free spins, which may be won organically or purchased, this effort is aided.
A respin is given whenever a winning combination occurs. When a winning symbol is adjacent to a blocker tile, both tiles are destroyed and removed from the board for the respin. When a respin ends with no new winning combinations, the game reverts to its original 6×3 grid size.
Boosting Capabilities
Embedded in some of the barriers is a symbol that grants extra abilities. The specific enhancement is activated when they are destroyed.
Destroys any obstructing objects in a cross-shaped area.
In a horizontal arc, all obstructions are eliminated.
Straight up and down obliterates everything in its path.
Removes all obstructions in a 3×3 space.
Bonus Turns
Collecting bonus symbols that emerge throughout the main game. When you get three of them within a single gaming round, you’ll receive six free spins, plus two more for each subsequent scatter you find. Each bonus symbol that appears during the bonus round adds one extra free spin to the total. When blockers are demolished during free spins, they remain destroyed for the duration of the feature, which is the only meaningful change. In other words, the grid does not reset itself between gratuitous rotations.
Incentives to Purchase
If allowed in your region, players can skip the bonus round and buy 100 times their stake worth of free spins. The bonus raises the return to player to 97.14%.
Judgment on Space-Based Slot Miners
Recognizing the many games that inspired Space Miners was a lot of fun. Everything from the aliens in slots like Cluster Tumble and TNT Tumble to the visual style and gameplay of games like Cluster Slide and Reactoonz. Space Miners, on the other hand, didn’t feel like a patchwork quilt duplicate, but rather like a DNA milkshake that resulted in something really pleasurable.
Cluster Tumble’s blocker demolition mechanism inspired us, but in practice, the two games couldn’t be more different. In contrast to Cluster Tumble, which may chain together many tumbles until the passage of time loses all significance, Space Miners provides only brief bursts of excitement. For instance, during a free spin, the game may either rapidly clear obstructions, set off respins, and progress toward an absurdly high number of win ways, or it can swiftly and utterly fail to do any of those things. Some of the feature blocks inspired a faster-paced variation of TNT Tumble. You could take your time in TNT Tumble and strategically plan out the obstacles to features you wished to eliminate. In Space Miner, you’ll suddenly find yourself in a race where you may either win or fail miserably.
There were three threads that connected the best of our test outcomes. The difference between winning 8 free spins and only 6 looked to be rather large. The second was to maximize the number of free spins earned during the feature by triggering random scatters, and the third was to fill the grid with as many symbols as possible as rapidly as possible. When we combined them, the resulting success rates reached well over 3,000x, which, given the sheer number of possible outcomes, might be rather high. After seeing Relax Gaming slots constantly exceed their limitations elsewhere, we’re counting down the days until Space Miner’s probable future bonus round hits the game’s win cap of 50,000x.
In sum, Relax Gaming delivered again another masterpiece with Space Miners. Relax are masters at creating games that are not only aesthetically stunning but also a potent mixture of tease, madden, joy, and thrill. Though Space Miners may drive would-be extraterrestrial miners up the wall, they do provide a shot at some substantial loot for those who get fortunate.