Disco Mania Megaways Merge

Disco Mania Megaways Merge: Slot Overview

Hear the words 'disco mania', and players will either be heading for the hills in terror or be pulling on their dancing shoes and getting their strut on. Okay, there is a middle ground option of indifference but let's roll with it. Players keen on cutting a rug get a boogie-centric slot in the form of Disco Mania Megaways Merge from software provider Skywind Group. Disco might be old news, but Skywind has worked one or two things into Disco Mania Megaways Merge to give it a modern, unique twist.

For a music genre that was famously flamboyant, Disco Mania Megaways Merge is a little restrained visually. The dual reel-sets are strangely dull, and while the purple disco ball effect of the background is colourful, it didn't demand we surrender to the beat and lose ourselves in the moment. Fortunately, the game's music, the actual beating heart and soul of disco, is pretty funky, so when combined with the rotating light effect did elicit a level of toe-tapping.

If part of disco fashion was standing out from the crowd, Disco Mania does this via the huge number of winning ways possible when its two grids merge. In the beginning, players get two regular 6-reel game grids, each providing up to 117,649 ways to win. Wins occur when matching symbols land in adjacent reels from the left side of the grid, triggering the cascade feature, possibly leading to the merge moment. More details to come. Till then, be aware that this medium volatile game has a default RTP of 96.5% and supplies stake options of 20 p/c to $/€200 per spin. Or you can flick the Double Chance button on to double the chance of triggering the bonus round, increasing the bet by 25%.

You might think that with so many possible winning ways when grids converge, symbol values would suffer, yet they're not so bad. For the 9 to A low pays, a six-of-a-kind win gets you 0.5-1.5x the bet, whereas landing six premium records, roller skates, microphones, or boom boxes is worth 2-5x the bet. Also, wilds are present on all reels and have the same payout value as the boombox. Usually, though, wilds are there to substitute normal pay symbols.

Disco Mania Megaways Merge: Slot Features

The Merge feature is Disco Mania's calling card which relies on the cascading wins mechanic to access. Winning symbols are removed by the cascade system, allowing other symbols to fall down and fill the empty cells. If another win results, then the cascade feature triggers again until no new winning combos appear.

When 3 consecutive cascade wins occur, the two grids merge into one. This grid can have up to 14 symbols on each reel and up to 7,529,536 active ways. When the cascade sequence ends, the grid splits into two again for the next paid or free spin.

Free Spins

One more symbol to look out for is the disco ball scatter. When 4 disco balls are in view at the end of a cascade sequence, 12 free spins are awarded. If more than 4 are in view, each additional disco ball awards +5 free spins. The rules in free spins are the same as the base game, with one exception. A progressive win multiplier now comes into play, starting the bonus round on x1 and rising by +1 after each winning cascade. The win multiplier does not reset between free spins like the Merge feature does, and there is no upper limit in place. During the bonus round, landing 3 scatter symbols awards an additional +3 free spins, plus 3 spins for every bonus symbol in view beyond 3.

Feature Buy

Finally, players in certain jurisdictions may have the option of buying free spins rather than waiting for them to launch naturally. The cost for guaranteeing at least four scatters land is 100x the base bet.

Disco Mania Megaways Merge: Slot Verdict

Testing the waters with a new feature is like going clubbing in an outrageous new garment – both are fraught with risk and reward. Get it wrong, and the fashion police may well administer a thorough thrashing with rolled-up copies of Vogue Magazine. Get it right, and you could be thrust into the gossip columns as a luminary of the scene. So where does Disco Mania Megaways Merge sit? First of all, good on Skywind for getting creative and trying something new. The Merge feature isn't entirely brand spanking new, though, since a similar sort of thing appeared in Beetlejuice Megaways, where it was possible to drastically expand the reels and ways. Beetlejuice Megaways didn't expand as much as Disco Mania Megaways Merge does, though, which can create one of the biggest Megaways grids around.

But hey, size isn't everything, and there are times when despite Disco Mania Megaways Merge's size, something feels missing. Some sort of side feature, perhaps, or a clever modifier that only appeared when grids merged. What it does is interesting enough for Megaways buffs to take a look at, yet the game might've impacted more with one or two extras on board. The same goes for Disco Mania's potential. While respectable at 10,000x the bet, this same level of reward, and far higher, is already possible on regular non-merged Megaways games. If Skywind had loosened the tap and given Disco Mania a really eye-catching max win, it might have added more justification for having 7 million+ Megaways.

A game with so many ways has an inherent overwhelming factor, but Disco Mania Megaways Merge refrains from totally freaking out the way a comparable game like Slot Vegas Megaquads is capable of doing (though to be fair, that one hasn't quite really proven its potential yet). The Merge feature has promise, though, and it would be interesting to see if/how Skywind evolves it.