Florageddon!

Florageddon!: Slot Overview

We're used to seeing zombie apocalypses shuffling their way across the landscape, devouring the living or advanced alien civilisations arriving to snatch earth's resources. However, Florageddon! from Yggdrasil Gaming presents a different kind of threat. In this game world, plants have evolved into dangerous entities which have risen up and taken back the planet. It's a scenario not without precedence. John Wyndham touched on the subject in the 1950s with his novel Day of the Triffids, which described a bunch of giant carnivorous plants populating a post-apocalyptic world. It's one of these worlds that players step into in Florageddon!, where its mechanics include dual progressive win multipliers, dropdowns, added wilds, special awards, pay both ways, and free spins.

It's not made clear quite how they've done it, but the plants in Florageddon! appear to have wiped out the human population and taken back the earth. The game takes place in what was probably a busy city scene yet is now overgrown with plant life, a traffic light hanging idle, a phone box out of commission, and a taxi cab all beat up. These aren't plants that simply grew back following humankind's demise, though. Many of them have mouths full of sharp teeth, devious grins, and pointy spikes. An ominous soundtrack reinforces the feeling something very bad happened around here…

Florageddon!'s horror flick antics are available to sample on any device, offering stakes from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin. Its math model is highly volatile and comes with four RTP settings, the highest of them being 96%. There were times when the hit frequency felt lower than the 18.15% it possesses, but wins can set off a train of events, including dropdown wins and other effects. The 5-reel, 3-row game board pays both ways and forms wins when identical symbols land on at least three consecutive reels starting from the leftmost reel or the rightmost reel.

For pay symbols, Florageddon! uses ivy-covered J-A card royals at first, paying 0.5x the bet for five of a kind, then road signs, clocks, lamps, and fire hydrants awarding 0.6-0.8x for five, then lastly four plants as the high pays worth 1-5x the stake for a five if a kind win. Wilds appear on all reels to replace any regular paying symbols.

Florageddon!: Slot Features

Florageddon! is a game that might need a bit of a push to get going, but once it's moving, it's got the goods to get some momentum on. It starts with the dropdown feature, which removes winning symbols from the game board when they hit. A wild symbol appears in one of the empty spaces, and the rest of the gaps are filled with symbols falling from above. If a new win is created after the dropdown, the feature will trigger again until no new win appears.

Multiplier

Tied in with dropdowns are two progressive win multipliers – one displayed on each side of the reels. If a win starts from the left side or the right side, the respective multiplier is increased. Note that it does not double each time the way Raptor Doublemax did but increases in certain increments. Multipliers continue to increase on each consecutive dropdown. When dropdowns end in the base game, the multipliers are reset. Both ways wins are multiplied by the combined value of the two multipliers.

Special Awards

A dropdown counter sits above the reels, activating a special award when it is filled. In the base game, it takes 4 consecutive dropdowns to fill; in free spins, 3 consecutive dropdowns are needed. Special awards include:

• Double Wild – two empty spaces are filled with wild symbols instead of the usual one.
• Multiplier Boost – both multipliers are increased by +10.
• Wild Stack – one reel generates three wild symbols, plus an extra three wilds above them for a future dropdown.
• Extra Life – when the dropdown sequence ends, symbols are cleared off the grid to let a new set drop in.

Free Spins

Landing 3, 4, or 5 free spins scatter symbols awards 7, 9, or 11 free spins, respectively. Before they begin, players can either collect or gamble for the chance to win up to 16 free spins. Note that getting the gamble wrong means you lose all of the free spins. During the feature, the multipliers do not reset between spins, and the special award counter takes three consecutive wins to fill rather than four, as in the base game.

Buy Bonus & Golden Bet

Some players may be able to access the bonus buy or Golden Bet when playing Florageddon! The Golden Bet increases the stake by 50%, decreasing the number of dropdowns required to fill the special award meter in the base game from four to three. The bonus buy lets players buy 7, 9, or 11 random free spins for 100x the bet or 16 free spins for 400x the bet.

Florageddon!: Slot Verdict

Florageddon! follows in the footsteps of slots like Multifly!, MexoMax!, and, more closely, Raptor DoubleMax. If you liked what Yggdrasil was shooting for in those three slots, there's a good chance you'll enjoy the ride they've rolled out in Florageddon! Audio-visually, it's not quite as strong as those that preceded it. The music gets a bit repetitively dirge-like, and while the graphics get a glowing effect on, they don't glow quite as brightly or as refined as they did in Raptor DoubleMax. Not saying this is anywhere near the same level as a game like Calavera Crush, but there's a tiny suspicion Yggdrasil Gaming eased up a bit when making Florageddon! It's perfectly fine, there are no complaints, yet it didn't have quite the same level of spit and polish lustre Raptor DoubleMax had.

Maybe because Raptor was the original, so the novelty shock is less. To compensate, Florageddon! packs a lot more features than Raptor DoubleMax did and sets them in an interesting game world. It's certainly got loads of multiplier action due to the pay both ways, multiply both ways feature. Doing it this way squeezes more use out of the grid rather than being focused on the first three reels a lot of the time. Adding the multipliers together for both ways wins adds a new dimension, as well. There wasn't the same feeling of the out-of-control double-up multiplier progression found in Raptor DoubleMax, which could build into the thousands, but not saying it can't happen here, and both games have the same max win at 20,000 times the stake.

Florageddon! doesn't have the streamlined, straightforward gaming Raptor DoubleMax had, which was a case of simply hitting spin until (hopefully) the dropdown/multiplier combo blew the heck right up. It's got a bunch of extra bits which, depending on taste, may dilute the experience or enhance it further. However, at its core, Florageddon! is still all about chasing runaway dropdown sequences where multipliers are progressing to impressive levels. In that regard, Florageddon!'s got everything needed to thrill as its predecessor could.