Compelling Video Slot Game Features This Year

As in any other video game niche, developers who are designing video slots for the online casino market must work hard to evolve their products to create compelling games that will cut through in a notoriously competitive market. This year it is no exaggeration to say that 100s of new titles are being released each month.

In recent years slots studios have become increasingly innovative and more willing to play with the basic architecture of a reel-based game to attract new players. Event-based features like dynamically changing reel sizes and multi-reel-set games have proved hugely popular, all supported by improvements in technology that lead to smarter and slicker graphics and animations.

Here we look at two of the most exciting modern game features that you can find in online slots right now.

xNudge Reels and xWays

You can always tell when a game studio knows that they are onto a winner with one of their new game ideas because very quickly they will be rolling out several new games all with the same feature. Sometimes a developer will also seek to trademark the format so competitors cannot copy it. In the case of No Limit City, one of Sweden’s best up and coming game developers, their xNudge and xWays features have taken off so quickly that already the team have rolled out close to a dozen games in less than 18 months, including ones like El Paso Gunfight xNudge, Infectious 5 xWays and Bushido Ways xNudge.

But what are xNudge and xWays?

Well the ‘x’ as you would expect, stands for an unknown and random number revealed within the game. In the case of xNudge it refers to how many times a stack of identical icons must be nudged up or down before it fills the entire visible reel. This process happens each time a stack lands. During the nudges, a win multiplier progresses with an extra 1x for each nudge. When the nudges are complete, then any wins are calculated and the multiplier applied to the total.

It’s a simple mechanic, and one that fruit machine players will be familiar with, but surprisingly it has not been used to good effect in the online environment until now. One of the best examples is in Deadwood, No Limit’s Wild West themed slot with an infamous high-risk game engine.

If you want to know more about the nuances of xNudge then there are plenty of reviews and game guides online where you can read about how it works differently within each individual slot.

The sibling feature to xNudge is the xWays format which randomly changes the number of paylines or payways on each spin, or in response to an event in the game. The best example of this is the San Quentin xWays slot game in which Razor Splits are used to break icons up into two or more new icons, dramatically and unexpectedly increasing the number of payline and pushing the maximum win up to 150,000x per spin.

Both xWays and xNudge are helping to propel No Limit City to the top of the current crop of young game studios and any video game with these features is worth checking out as the ability to change the nature of the paytable dynamically makes for more tension, thrills and spills.

Expanding Reels Games

The other big game feature that is driving the success of some big online slots this year is Expanding Reels.  This clever tweak to the architecture of video slot games was first made popular by one of No Limit City’s big rivals, but also a developer that paved the way for their success. Big Time Gaming are Australia’s most hyped and loved slots developers, and a studio whose meteoric rise led to Live Casino specialists, Evolution Gaming, buying the company and their back catalogue of slots in April 2021.

The expanding reels format was popularised by Big Time Gaming’s Megaways™ game engine which is used in blockbusters like Bonanza and Monopoly Megaways™. The basic premise is that on any given spin the number of rows per reel can increase from 2 up to a maximum of 7. When all 6 game reels display 7 rows, so 117,649 paylines are active.

The randomness of the reel display, coupled with the super-high variance these games are known for, makes for very volatile gameplay and potentially massive wins when the full set of paylines are in play. And now, Big Time Gaming’s Megaways™ engine has proved so popular that they license it out to rivals such as Red Tiger and Blueprint, and every month new titles featuring the expanding reels are arriving at UK casinos.

Best example of Megaways™ games this year include Big Bad Wolf Megaways™ from Quickspin, Invaders Megaways™ by SG Digital and Black Gold 2 Megaways™ by Stake Logic.

So, next time you venture into the world of real money video games, make sure you look out for xWays, xNudge and Megaways™ slots. You won’t be disappointed by their features that show how these products continue to evolve each year.