Contact

Enter the ancient Mayan ruins of old Mexico. Here you’ll encounter charmed rock carvings, mythical creatures and some seriously impressive payouts. When I settled in to play a few rounds of Contact, I was sceptical to say the least. The slot name didn’t exactly sell itself and I was so over the whole aztec, inca, tribal nonsense. But in the end I had to eat my words because despite the overdone theme, the game has to be the best designed I’ve ever come across.

The graphics are beautiful and detail oriented, somebody definitely did some research there. There are nine carvings in total, so there’s a lot of variance in terms of matching up, but this doesn’t make wins difficult (more on this below). The soundtrack is excellent, I didn’t once want to hit mute, which is impressive for me. The low, dulcet tones are overlaid with the occasional tribal riff which breaks things up nicely.

Contact also works with a really nice colour palette, that’s very easy on the eye. I’ve played slots which have made a very strong attempt to blind me so this was a sincerely welcome change. Set within the ancient ruins of a Mayan temple, this slot has resurrected creativity within the industry, bringing clever slant to a tired scene.

Playing Contact may seem a little odd initially, as it doesn’t require the usual line up of matching symbols. Instead, you need to collect clusters of matching blocks. The non-matching blocks will disappear and the remaining will clunk down to the bottom of the grid, where your winnings are tallied. There are also many special features to get your head around.

Here’s the breakdown:

High variance/high reward is a feature that’s become a common trademark of Play’n GO slots and Contact is no exception. As a high volatility slot, you’re unlikely to pick up small winnings on every other spin as you would do with some other low volatility slots. Contact is all about the big wins, and most of these will stem from the Bonus and Super Bonus Rounds. Here you’ll be in with a chance to trigger the Block Destroyer special feature which will award you a 30x multiplier that can lead to wins of 1,517.5 times your total bet.

Playing Contact can get a little bit distracting as you’re inadvertently drawn to the desire to watch as many random matching clusters form as possible. But what you should really be looking out for is a cluster that builds all the way up to the top multiplier. Crack this feature and you’re golden, as you’ll be rewarded with a bonus round that could inundate you with a myriad of free spins and modifiers. At this point you’d have to be pretty unlucky not to wind up on the receiving end of a nice little payout that the ancient Mayans would have traded all their gold for.