Annihilator: ten lines, a fire trail and a real band
Annihilator was released on 23 April 2020 and belongs to Play’n GO’s music-licence series, alongside titles devoted to other bands. What sets it apart is that the soundtrack uses genuine tracks by the Canadian thrash metal group, and that its founder, guitarist Jeff Waters, takes the role of the wild symbol. The grid stays deliberately simple: five reels, three rows, ten fixed paylines. The low symbols are the usual 10-to-Ace card ranks; the high ones include a cracked mirror, a guitar and the character Alice, who pays 30x the stake for five. The Jeff Waters wild substitutes for every pay symbol and pays 40x the stake for five. Stakes run from 0.10 to 100 per spin. The first feature, In Command, triggers at random in the base game. Any wild visible on the grid then expands to the full height of its reel; if several wilds are present, all of them expand. If the spin still produces no win, a free respin is awarded with the wilds locked in place, and the process repeats until a win or a bonus triggers. That is an explicit guarantee, and a rare one in the catalogue. The second is called Fun Palace. Three doll-shaped bonus symbols on reels 2, 3 and 4 open a pick round. Each doll turned over reveals a prize: a multiplier between 1x and 5x the stake lets you keep going, while a multiplier of 10x to 50x ends the round. A doll can also reveal the free spins symbol, which switches straight to the third feature. That one takes its name from a band track: Set the World on Fire. Three scatters, or the corresponding Fun Palace pick, award eight free spins. An expanded Jeff Waters wild moves randomly across the grid on each spin and marks flaming positions in its wake, one to three symbols high. If another wild comes to rest on one of those positions, the entire trail turns wild. Each additional scatter adds two spins, up to a total of fifty. The maximum win is 5,000x the stake, meaning 500,000 at the 100 top bet. There is no bonus buy.
