About Holy Diver
Holy Diver is the first title in Big Time Gaming's Reel Adventure line, released on 25 January 2019 as an exclusive and 7 February 2019 wide according to SlotCatalog — not October 2018 as our record claimed. The studio describes it on its official page as "the combination of a great looking side scrolling arcade game combined with a Megaways". The game is licensed from Carlin Music / Sony ATV, per the studio, for the Ronnie James Dio song it is named after.
A clarification is needed first, because our database had it wrong. Big Time Gaming invented two different systems. Megaways varies the number of symbols shown on each reel and counts ways to win by multiplying those heights together: six reels of seven symbols give 117,649. Megaclusters, by contrast, pays adjacent groups of symbols and powers games such as Star Clusters and Cyberslot. Holy Diver unambiguously belongs to the first family. The 586,789 ways figure we were showing is also arithmetically impossible: a Megaways count is necessarily the product of six reel heights, and 586,789 factors into 7 × 17 × 4,931, where a four-digit prime factor cannot be a reel height. The correct figure, 586,971, factors into 11 × 11 × 11 × 9 × 7 × 7 — six factors, all plausible.
Reel Adventure is the system carrying the game. A hero moves sideways as the reels spin and periodically opens bonus chests. Big Time Gaming publishes what those chests hold: any symbol can be plucked out and become Wild across reels 2 to 5; fireballs fly from the chest to create random wilds; a sword bonus can accumulate to a 7 × 7 × 7 multiplier, meaning x343; and shield gems spawn a one-hit multiplier on levels 2 and 3 while triggering the free spins once all four are collected. SlotCatalog, for its part, puts the sword multiplier at 7x, which contradicts the x343 the studio publishes; we keep the official version.
The game runs three levels plus a boss level, described by Big Time Gaming as The Valley, The Desert, The Mystical Forest and The Sorcerous Castle. At the end of each level the player chooses: take the free spins now, or level up. Every level-up improves the end feature by increasing the Wild multipliers when gems are discovered and during the free spins. It is a trade between an immediate reward and a larger, more distant one.
That choice has a consequence few machines share: the RTP is not constant. SlotCatalog states that the three worlds each carry their own RTP and volatility, the range running from 96.39% to 96.54%. For every €100 wagered, the house therefore keeps between €3.46 and €3.61 depending on which world you are playing. We record 96.39% in the database, the low end of the range, rather than displaying the flattering figure. Our record previously carried 96.06%, a number no source we consulted supports.
Max win is 23,306x stake in free spins and 17,042x in the base game according to SlotCatalog, not the 23,000x we had. It is a modest ceiling for this studio: the median across the 34 Big Time Gaming games in the BetsRank database is 36,201x. In money, 23,306x is €2,331 at the €0.10 minimum, €23,306 at €1 and €466,120 at the €20 maximum. Free spins run up to 22 according to the sources consulted, and no bonus buy is offered.
