Highway to Hell: Slot Overview
According to the Neil Young lyrics, ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away‘, but is it, really? Perhaps the answer to that question depends to an extent on age, current life stage, and general temperament. When we’re young, before the responsibilities of family, mortgage, and kids creep in, shoot, the sky’s the limit, it’s easy to throw caution to the wind and give in to peer pressure to impress the crowd. After all, if bones heal and cuts scar, it might be easy for someone to think they’re bulletproof. However, few to none of us are invulnerable to life in the long run, so for a little taste of livin’ on the edge, throwing it all away on a dice roll, how about we get our motors runnin’ with developer Nolimit City‘s reckless slot Highway to Hell?
The chaps in Highway to Hell look as though they may have broken out of hell as much as heading towards it. This is because instead of flesh and skin-coated human beings, the bike riders are skeleton characters instead. They’re a bit like the flaming skull guy from Marvel’s Ghost Rider, where Johnny Blaze made a deal with the arch-demon Mephisto to save his foster father’s life. There’s no Johny Blaze or Mephisto in this game, though, which centres on the MC Hellbound motorcycle gang as they raise hell on the open road in a back-of-nowhere USA-type setting while dodging the law. Though, what the cops are going to do with a group of undead hellraisers is anyone’s guess.
Highway to Hell is played on a 6×4 gaming area with locked Enhancer Cells covering the bottom positions on the four middle reels. Symbols from winning combinations explode off the reels, allowing new symbols to drop in to replace them, repeating this way until no new win appears. By default, there are 1,296 ways to win, but this number increases as Enhancer Cells are unlocked and symbols on the grid are split. The volatility is high, and of the four RTP options, 96.03% being the highest. As is usually the case, Highway to Hell provides a wide variety of ways to gamble, though base bet selection is 20 c to $/€100.
Flaming dice, a flaming playing card, a 13 of spades, a flaming skull, and a demonic face are Highway to Hell’s low-pay symbols, while 5 skeletal character symbols are the premiums. Six-of-a-kind winning combinations are worth 0.3x to 0.6x the bet if made up of low pays or 1x to 2x the bet for the highs.
Highway to Hell: Slot Features
The features in Highway to Hells are its Avasplit Effect, wilds, xNudge Wilds, Enhancer Cells, Demon symbols, xWays, xSplit, Hell Spins, Extra Spins, Boosters, and bonus buys.
Avasplit Effect
When winning symbols explode, some remaining symbols are randomly selected for the Avasplit Effect, which increases their symbol size by +1.
Wilds & xNudge Wilds
Regular wilds and xNudge Wilds may land on any reel, substituting any regular paying symbol. If just a part of an xNudge Wild lands, it nudges up or down until it’s fully stacked. Each nudge increases the xNudge Wild multiplier by +1. If a nudged-over symbol has a multiplier, its value is added to the xNudge Wild multiplier. It will not nudge down on a locked Enhancer position. An xNudge may get a higher starting multiplier if it comes from a Hellevator Booster that already has a multiplier.
Enhancer Cells
With each win, an Enhancer Cell position is unlocked from left to right, revealing a symbol when unlocked. If the revealed symbol is removed, a new symbol appears in its position on the next avalanche.
Demon
When a Demon lands, it removes a random number of symbols from the reels, though symbols larger than size 1 cannot be removed. The Demon then transforms into a random regular pay symbol holding a multiplier equal to the number of symbols it removed. If no symbol is removed, it transforms into a regular pay symbol with a multiplier of x1.
xWays
An xWays symbol transforms into a regular pay symbol or wild. It reveals 2 to 4 symbols of a matching type, thereby increasing the number of ways to win. If more than one xWays symbol lands, all of them reveal the same symbol.
xSplit
An xSplit symbol splits all symbols on its reel, doubling the symbol size and converting itself into a wild. xSplits split all other symbols except scatters.
Hell Spins
Hitting 3 scatters or Hellevator Boosters in the base game awards 8 free spins. If a Hellevator Booster lands during the bonus trigger or during the bonus round, it persists on the reels throughout the round.
The Hellevator Booster reveals a random symbol and cannot be removed by a Demon symbol. If the revealed symbol is part of a win, it is removed and a new symbol is revealed on the next avalanche. It appears that the Avasplit Effect increases the Hellevator multiplier, and when the Hellevator Booster gets a multiplier, its value is stored and progresses throughout the bonus feature. If an xNudge increases the Hellevator Booster’s multiplier, the boost lasts for the current spin before returning to its previous value when the spin ends. Enhancer symbols reset on each spin.
Landed scatters are collected during free spins to progress the scatter meter. When 3 scatters are collected, +2 spins are awarded, and a Hellevator Booster is added to the reels from the next spin. The scatter meter resets after collecting 3 scatters.
Extra Spin
When Hell Spins end, players may have the chance to buy an additional spin that keeps the Hellevator multiplier of the previous spin.
Nolimit Booster & Bonus Buy
xBet costs 2.4x the base bet, guaranteeing a scatter symbol on the leftmost reels, while Bonus Hunt at 15x lands valueless blank symbols, scatters, or Hellevator Boosters. Players may buy free spins triggered by 3 scatters for 60x or a free spins trigger including 1, 2, or 3 Hellevator Boosters for 100x, 180x, or 350x the bet, respectively. A 30%/20%/30%/20% Lucky Draw bonus costs 162x the bet. The other bonus buy is God Mode at 3,800x, which provides a chance to land the max win on a single spin.
Highway to Hell: Slot Verdict
Unless you’re a Marvel reader, skeletons riding motorcycles might not be something you see every day, but if you’re a gambler, then a lot of the mechanics in Highway to Hell will probably seem familiar. The reason being, Nolimit City has stuffed a lot of its goto features into Highway to Hell. This includes favourites such as xNudge Wilds, Enhancers Cells, and xSplits. Doing so might not set the highway alight with ingenuity, but they’re solid features which are able to enhance the slots they’re a part of. Speaking of Enhancer Cells, while reading the rules, it was interesting to see there wasn’t such a written focus on landing special feature symbols in them as there has been in previous slots like San Quentin 2 Death Row or Mental 2, for example, though you can still do so when the game is in play.
Instead, one of the main focuses here seems to be on splitting or xWaying the deuce out of the reels to cram as many symbols onto the reels as possible in order to nudge closer to the game’s 20,066x the bet max win. If you’re lucky, splits and increasing ways take place alongside xNudge Wild multipliers, Demon multipliers, or multipliers on symbols in general. The Avasplit Effect is a new one (where that name came from might be interesting to know), and it amplifies Highway to Hell’s ability to split symbols on the reels. It’s totally random, so you never know where the chopping up of symbols may occur. When turning attention to free spins, obviously reels heavy with Hellevator Boosters racking up multipliers are what you want to see.
Whilst Nolimit City might not have brought its freakiest innovations to bear in Highway to Hell, it’s a slot full of good ideas, some of them worth a definite look-see for fans of the studio’s output, such as the xZone-ish Demon symbol. The Extra Spin, too, the likes of which Relax Gaming used in Wild Yield, might interest players keen on testing their luck post-feature. On the whole, Highway to Hell felt like coming together of Nolimit City features in an arguably less-suspenseful Punk Rocker 2 type of game that scratches the splitting, waying, and nudging itch without necessarily revolutionising it.
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