Mega Heist

Review Mega Heist

Mega Heist is one of those pokies about the police vs. criminals although it’ll start with prison guards who face a much more challenging job to control inmates. The grid of the game is found in a prison yard with a few prisoners getting ready to break out by climbing their way up the grey ways. This sounds like a pretty rough story, but the funky music will make you feel at ease whilst the visuals are also highly stylish. We very much enjoyed this whole blend which you’ll probably notice in this review as we’re happy to tell you more about the game found in plenty of online casinos that offer their casino games in New Zealand.

How to Play

It shouldn’t be too difficult to get to know the basic rules of this game, especially with this quick overview of how to play Mega Heist by Relax Gaming.

• There are two options to make your first spin in this Mega Heist online pokie, both of them available on the right side. The bigger black circle with the grey cursor is the game’s play button that will make the 5×4 grid spin.
• The coins give you the flexibility to regulate the current bet from $ 0.1 to a max of $ 50.
• There is also the play sign that lets you pick the number of automated spins in case you want to let go of your keyboard or device and let others work for you.
• With the fast-forward sign, you can speed up the spins. When clicking on the triple line, you will enter the paytable. The settings of this online casino game can be accessed through the same window.
• Make sure to stick to our list of recommended online casinos.

Symbol Wins

You may not get all 13 icons available in the Mega Heist pokie in the first spin. Still, you should learn more about them. We have eleven regular symbols promising solid wins to players with three to five matching ones on adjacent reels on the same row or one row below or above the previous icon. These are the so-called connected ways mechanic we mentioned earlier in our Mega Heist pokie review.

• The 4 playing card suits (from a blue Diamond to a red Heart) come with the lowest values between 0.7 and 2x the stake.
• The next three pay identical rewards worth 1 to 3x the total stake. These represent a Soap, a pair of Dice, and Handcuffs.
• Then we have the 3 different Prisoners/Robbers giving you between 2 and 6x your stake whilst the Prison Guard awards payouts of 4 to 20x.
• No direct prizes are awarded for Wild and Bonus symbols.

Bonus Features

As soon as you manage to activate the escape bonus or mega heist bonus, Mega Heist becomes a lot more interesting which is comforting to know as the base game isn’t that special at all. There is not much to experience in the base game, but the 3 bonus features offer a lot of potential as you’ll discover soon:

Escape Bonus

First of all, you’ll need 2 bonus symbols to activate the Mega Heist escape bonus. That means a big change as the playing field is now divided as follows: The 5×4 grid is divided into a 4×4 robber’s zone and a 1×4 safe zone on the right side of the grid.

Escaped prisoners are always placed on the first reel (maximum of 4 at a time). They move one position to the right every spin with the goal of eventually reaching the safe zone on reel 5. Each prisoner escaped brings either a cash prize or a bonus symbol.

However, there is a chance that the escaped prisoner will get caught before reaching the safe zone. Above the prisoner’s zone you’ll see an extra horizontal row on which only policemen can land. If an escaped prisoner is caught by the police, he loses the cash prize or bonus symbol he is carrying along. But if an escaped prisoner with a bonus symbol reaches the safe zone, the mega heist bonus feature is triggered.

Mega Heist Free Spins Bonus

The mega heist bonus feature can be triggered by spinning 3+ bonus symbols. The number of free spins you earn in this way increases as follows:

• 3 bonus symbols award 10 escaped prisoners.
• 4 bonus symbols award 15 escaped prisoners.
• 5 bonus symbols award 30 escaped prisoners.

At the top left of the screen you can see how many escaped prisoners are still in the game. An escaped prisoner caught by a policeman is removed from the game, so the feature ends when there are no more escaped prisoners on the playing field.

An escaped prisoner who manages to reach the safe zone can be placed back on the first reel to try to reach the safe zone again. This Mega Heist feature is divided into 3 levels:

• Level 1 – Gas Station: Once the prize pool reaches 150x the stake, you will advance to Level 2.
• Level 2 – Nightclub: Once the prize pool reaches 1.5000x the stake, you will progress to Level 3.
• Level 3 – bank: The maximum prize money to be won in level 3 is 15,000x.

As with the escape bonus, escaped prisoners also bring something with them in the mega heist bonus feature. When this happens it’s all about the bet multipliers. On their way to the safe zone, escaped prisoners can collect special power-up symbols that appear on the playing field every now and then. It concerns the following special power-up symbols:

• A multiplier that increases the escaped prisoner’s bet multiplier by x2, x3, x5 or x10 1, 2, 3 or 5 escaped prisoners are added to the total.
• During the upcoming spin, no policeman will appear on the top row.
• The escaped prisoner disguises himself, so that he can no longer be caught by a policeman.
• The bus takes 8 escaped prisoners to the safe zone.
• The motorcycle takes 2 escaped prisoners to the safe zone.

Buy Feature

The Buy feature allows you to buy your way into the Mega Heist Bonus feature for 150x the bet. This feature is available for Kiwis and sees the RTP increasing to 96.5% (96.19% without).

Payout Metrics

The Mega Heist RTP comes with an RTP of 96.19%. The good thing about it is that it’s the same across all online casinos available in New Zealand as there are no ranging RTP. When it comes to the game’s variance you’ll need to bear in mind that it’s very high (5 out of 5). Winning combinations in this online pokie are made every 4.98 spins as the hit frequency rate is stated to be 20.07%. Please note that this is the average calculated over thousands of sessions with short term differences always being possible. The maximum potential payout goes up to a max of 16,591x the stake. The biggest wins tend to come from the most important feature of the game, the Mega Heist Bonus feature.

Summary

The designers of Relax Gaming have tried their luck with 3D casino games before and Mega Heist might just be the best result so far, we have to say. There is a lot of action to be prepared for as breaking out of prison is only the first step to getting rich. Other than what one would expect, the first “prison” part of this pokie isn’t as thrilling as hoped for, but once you’re out of there you will see how things spice up. This is particularly true for the Mega Heist feature with the bank stage offering prizes up to 15,000x the stake and a total of 16,591x the bet when you make it to the highest level. In the end it’s all about breaking out and staying away from the police whilst you get close to the action in a bank heist. This sounds like all the excitement once can handle before it gets too much.