What are the most eye-catching features on slot games?

This past week we have seen the release of Microgaming's latest slot game Boom Pirates, which has broken new ground in slot gaming this week by offering players a chance to play with potentially more than 10 MILLION ways to win across the reels.

This staggering new innovation on the Boom Pirates slot by the team at Foxium Games, as part of their exclusive deal with Microgaming, means that we are now reaching the stage where slot games are treading into new territory when it comes to unusual features and bonuses that have seldom, if ever, been seen before on a slot game.

It is strange to think that there was a time when a single pay line was the only option for slot games and for many years, this only increased by a couple of lines to two, three, four or five pay lines across some slots.

Of course, the move to digital versions of the game, rather than mechanical, saw a move to games with more lines playable and it wasn't long before we had 10, 20, 25 and even 50 pay line slots. Soon, Microgaming innovated further with a 243 Ways to Win slot and since then we have seen that figure grow to 1024 Ways to Win, and so on.

However, with Boom Pirates offering players over 10 million ways to win when the reels are expanded to the full 9x6 matrix, are we seeing the start of a new era of slots, one where there could be an almost limitless number of ways to win across the reels?

Personally, I'm not so sure about that. The only way you can increase the ways to win on a slot is to increase the number of symbols on each reel and then increase the number of reels and there comes a point in a slot game where having more symbols and/or more reels, simply becomes impractical, generally because you can't fit them all on a screen comfortably.

Having said that, there are some features on slots that are and were truly ground-breaking in their time. What were they and what games were they best displayed on?

1. The guaranteed 1 million plus jackpot prize - Mega Moolah

Microgaming had already developed a number of popular progressive jackpot slots in the early 2000s but for their next game, they wanted something that would change the landscape of progressive jackpot slots forever. A game which would ALWAYS offer a cash prize of at least a million in one of the following currencies; GBP, EUR, USD, CAD, NZD, CHF. The jackpot is also available in other currencies such as SEK, but in Sweden the jackpot actually starts from 10 million SEK.

That game was Mega Moolah and following its release in 2006, the game delivered precisely that. A progressive jackpot prize that would always be at least 1,000,000 in size and often would grow to considerably more than that.

It is hard to overstate the impact that the Mega Moolah slot has had on the industry. It is one of the most popularly played games in the world, a Guinness World Record holder for the largest ever pay out on an online slot and already in 2019 alone, it has made nine people millionaires (in some cases, multi-millionaires) across the globe.

Other games now have followed the Mega Moolah lead and offer regular prizes of million-plus jackpots, but none quite seem to have captured the imagination of a generation as this famous Microgaming progressive has.

2. Quest Style Bonus Features - Thunderstruck II

One of the most exciting aspect of modern slots is that they come with bonus features and of course, Free Spins bonus games are the ones that really capture the imagination of slot players. Not only because they are free, but usually because they also offer the player the best chance of a bigger value win in the game they are playing.

However, the Thunderstruck II slot (and latterly, the Immortal Romance slot) took the humble Free Spins bonus feature and made it something special. In Thunderstruck II, in the Hall of Spins bonus, there are four separate Free Spins bonus games to play, but you must unlock each one in turn by triggering the bonus a set number of times. This 'quest' element to the game would not work unless one key feature was integrated into the slot, the ability to save your progress in the game and continue on your next session.

By offering this on the Thunderstruck II slot, players could now work their way through the bonuses and each bonus was more than just Free Spins, offering additional features such as Expanding Wilds and similar for each bonus round. Your reward for triggering Free Spins often enough was to have the ability to select any of the four different games to play from then on.

So popular was this quest-style Hall of Spins bonus, that Microgaming repeated it on Immortal Romance to great success.

3. Rolling Reels - Jungle Jim El Dorado

Rolling Reels can go by any number of different names, Cascading Reels, Avalanche Reels or similar but essentially all these names refer to the same thing and that is the fact that on these games, the reels do not spin as on a standard slot, but rather the symbols drop down into position from above and when a winning line is made, these symbols will disappear and be replaced by symbols dropping down from above and new symbols filling the blank space on the reels.

Of course, this then gives the player an opportunity to win again on a single spin and thus this is the real appeal of the Rolling Reels feature. Many games offer at Multiplier Trail alongside the feature which means if you can trigger successive Rolling Reels wins from the same spin, you will increase the value of the multiplier on that win from the standard 1x up to anything up to 15x the standard amount.

Although a simple premise, the Rolling Reels appeal lies in the fact that it is possible to land multiple wins from a single spin, which makes it feel like it is great value for money for the player. A number of slot games from other companies also feature similar features and all have similar names and the number of games of this type is increasing over time.

For me, these are the three most unusual and eye-catching features on slot games, alongside our 10 million Ways to Win new Boom Pirates slot. What are your favourite features that makes a slot a must-play game?