The Big Heist: A Review of Slot Machines
The crime rate in the United States reportedly skyrocketed beginning in the 1960s, with possible causes including the decline of traditional family structures, the impact of the Baby Boom generation, and other factors. We could spend a great deal of time discussing the theses, but instead, let’s fire up The Great Stick-up by Pragmatic Play and get a first-person (well, almost) look at the time period. The Great Stick-up is a slot machine game based on a heist that took place in a tiny North American town in the 1960s, complete with mystery symbols and free games.
It hasn’t been long since Pragmatic Play’s last foray into criminal territory, the cartoonishly designed slot Cash Patrol. In contrast, The Great Stick-up has a completely distinct feel and set of characteristics. This one has a more suave appearance and a much harder rocking sound. The location is also atypical. The deserted streets in the background give off a Wild West vibe, and there are little hints as to who or what is being insulted. Moneylender or well-to-do local? Maybe it’s cops chasing criminals, maybe it’s Money Collects collecting Money symbols, maybe it’s neither. The Great Stick-up’s free spins reveal more of the narrative, which appears to involve a jailbreak. The Pragmatic Play sheen makes everything interesting, so you won’t get bored waiting to see out what occurs.
Select a stake between 20 pence and 100 pounds or euros each spin to get started. It’s a good idea to check the RTP version you’re using by reading the documentation while you’re at it. The best one has a value of 96.3%, while the worst one has a value of 94.4%. Expect a very unpredictable mathematical model with a hit frequency of roughly 1 in 3 regardless of the return amount.
No matter the medium, the criminal mayhem unfolds throughout a gaming grid of 5 reels and 3 rows with 20 fixed paylines. All wins are paid from the leftmost reel to the rightmost, beginning with the first reel, and need at least three identical symbols. There are four gangster insignia, a stack of cash, a gun, a pipe, a magnifying glass, a detective’s cap, a map, handcuffs, and a pipe full of money. Payouts for matching five standard symbols range from 1x to 10x the wager, with payouts for matching five gangster symbols increasing to 15x to 50x the wager (despite their decidedly un-1960s aesthetic). In addition, wild symbols appear on all reels, and they can replace ordinary symbols or award payouts of up to 75 times the wager for a line of five wilds.
The Big Heist: Gambling Machine Options
The Great Stick-up lacks any noteworthy extras in its main game. If you get 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols, you’ll win a payout of 2x, 10x, or 100x your wager plus 7 free games. During the bonus round, a progressive feature and a new mystery symbol that sticks around appear. If a sticky mystery symbol appears during a free spin, it will stay in place for the rest of the bonus round. The box to the right of the reels will always open to disclose the symbol kind.
Small overlay symbols can appear on any regular-sized symbol at random during free spins. When you gather 2 overlay symbols, the mystery symbol is changed to the one with the highest payout. Once the premium symbol with the highest payout is reached, the progression function cannot be activated again. Additionally, an additional free spin is granted whenever an upgrade takes place.
The Supreme Court’s Slot Machine Conviction
There is some defending going on, but whether or not it’s very amazing is debatable because the gameplay isn’t that engaging. Since nothing exciting happens in the main game save for normal line wins, the bonus round is where most of the excitement occurs. At least in our tests, the occurrence of bonus spins was very predictable. The frequency of this feature is significantly higher than average for a Pragmatic Play slot. Not every spin, but official bonus round frequency numbers would have helped corroborate the anecdotal findings.
Since the remainder of The Great Stick-up wasn’t all that thrilling, perhaps Pragmatic Play might have sold more copies by emphasizing the game’s high rate of juicy, free spins wins. Given that the original game spent so much time in a repetitive loop without actually doing anything, perhaps Pragmatic Play included that groovy disco tune in order to create tension where none existed. Not very, at any rate. The Great Stick-up’s bonus game is slightly more engaging than the main game. It’s simple to speed through the progression feature and reach a higher symbol, but I had trouble getting many of the sticky mystery symbols into play. Even while not every bonus round ended up being a letdown, playing them all quickly became tedious. The Great Stick-up has a win maximum of 5,000x the stake, and once it’s been reached, the bonus round is immediately over.
While The Great Stick-up looks great and has an exciting soundtrack, its limited features and overly frequent but underwhelming bonus rounds ultimately bring the experience down. It’s not that The Great Stick-up doesn’t have its share of exciting moments, but after a series of underwhelming free spin rounds, we found ourselves losing interest and giving up.
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