King Kong Cash Slot – Free Demo

The ape asleep on the throne

Yes, it's an exceedingly evident selection of theme, first of all. The mallet, the barrels and the Empire State Building each end up as a bonus round in their own right. Also, one must inquire. What arrived first - the notion of transforming a colossal ape, barrels and the Empire State Building into a slot, or the pun on King Kong? Kong is spotted asleep beside the reels, in an effort to further heighten the humorous side, only to wake up midgame. Golden Monkeys turn up inside several of the bonus rounds, and collecting them is what moves Kong forward. Apparently the tale (if you can call it that) develops around a heap of golden barrels; it centers around the principal character Kong himself, a primate that loves to toy with his mallet, quite literarily. The mallet has a job: once the reels stop on a winning combination Kong sometimes beats them, holding the trigger symbols for a respin that repeats until the win stops improving. I'll never know whether he's irate or merely bored, however.

King Kong Cash is a Blueprint Gaming slot from January 2017. Wins pay from two matching symbols, running from the far left reel across consecutive reels. It's a 5-reel, 20 win line video slot, playable on all devices from 0.20.

A paytable that never names its stake

Argh, these paytables! So many game creators cling to this antiquated manner of deliberately misleading players, and I'm baffled as to why. The help screens carry the win line diagrams and stop there; the symbol values are not on them at all. Every pay figure is printed in cash at some bet level; the game never bothers to tell you about it. What!? Which bet level, where, how? These type of trickery has less to do with adhering to conventions than fooling players into believing the dreadful payouts are better than they actually are.

Not only visually, the paytable is indeed agonizing to look at, and nothing on it can be interpreted as a multiple of your stake. Only the highest win on each line is paid, and wins on separate lines are added together. So you're left guessing at what 5 across a line is actually worth. The biggest single win of my 400 spins came out of the base game rather than a bonus: 200.00 on spin 399, 100 times the 2.00 stake. Sleepy Kong is what rescues the base game. It needs to, because only 119 of those 400 spins paid anything at all, and 69 of the 119 returned less than the stake. If Kong wakes during any game there's a chance he hands over Banana Cannon Wilds, a Golden Barrel Super Spin that bursts barrels into matching symbols, a King Kong Spin Streak that respins and holds the trigger symbols, or a Bonus Boost that appends bonus symbols to the spin. The banana bomb lands on the centre reel position and explodes extra positions wild, and Kong can then smash the ground for a respin that holds those wilds where they are.

The wild is depicted by a golden barrel, or Wild symbol as they call it, and it arrives in three versions - Banana Cannon Wilds, Empire Spin Roaming Wilds and Standard Wilds. Three wilds standing as a win of their own, or those same wilds used with another symbol to make a longer win, pay whichever of the two is higher. It substitutes for everything except scatters and bonus symbols. The Golden Kong Free Spins bank every special wild that lands and then replay the lot of them across a run of Wild Spins. As you will see, it plays a considerable role in this game. Across 400 spins at 2.00 the balance moved from 1,000.00 to 980.60.

Where the wheel stops

The bonus feature is triggered when landing 3 or more bonus symbols anywhere in view. It happened five times in my session, on spins 34, 193, 289, 323 and 365. The landing itself grants nothing, only entry, and the manner the bonus is played is a bit different from what you may have seen before. The gaps between those triggers ran from 34 spins at the shortest to 159 at the longest. A wheel is spun and halts on one of 5 features:

Barrel Blast. You select barrels, and matching 3 of the same symbol pays a total bet multiplier. A special icon behind one of the barrels upgrades those multipliers, and collecting 3 Golden Monkeys drops you into the Big Monkey Bonus.

King Kong Trail is a retro platform game. Each barrel advances Kong one to five windows, and a Golden Monkey takes him straight to the end game. Chosen barrels move Kong along a multiplier trail until a Bomb concludes it.

Big Monkey Bonus, the final game. A Bomb behind a banana ends the round and pays the total bet multiplier reached by then. A carousel grants a multiplier, and banana picks keep it alive.

Empire Free Spins, which ascend the Empire State Building on ever bigger reel sets. Golden Monkeys collected on the reel symbols push you up a level, and more spins arrive as you climb and each time a level is completed.

Golden Kong Free Spins are played on a 5x4 grid with 40 win lines. Bet per line and total bet carry over from the spin that triggered the round. They collect wilds for the Wild Spins that follow. This one can't be retriggered from inside itself, though extra spins may be handed out during the Wild Spins.

Furthermore, any feature win except the Big Monkey Bonus can be gambled toward one of the features above it. The gamble screen ranks the five features bottom to top by average payout, and winning a step eliminates every feature below the one you reached. Or toward the Mystery Win segment. That segment pays a mystery cash value worked out as a multiplier of your total bet.

Essentially, the bonus game is a wheel type bonus with five very distinct results behind it.

Minty’s Final Note: A third of everything I won back over 400 spins arrived through five bonus rounds, and the run closed at 97.6% of what went in. The 1,000x ceiling sits behind a wheel whose segment weighting Blueprint never prints.

What the five rounds returned

The wheel determines everything, and the game caps out at 1,000 times the stake. Blueprint has gone back to the character twice since, and King Kong Cash Prize Lines, from February 2021, runs 12 lines at an RTP of 96.03% against the 20 lines and 95.79% of this January 2017 original. So it's difficult to say for certain what kind of potential lies within this slot. King Kong Cash Go Bananas Jackpot King followed in May 2023 with an RTP of 93.49%, and both of the newer builds are capped at 50,000x the bet rather than 1,000x. My five rounds paid 256.40 between them, a third of everything the session won back.

With that said, the bonuses were relatively common over 400 spins, arriving at a rate of 1 per 80 or so spins. The balance peaked at 1,095.20 on spin 48 and bottomed out at 782.60. I could have just been fortunate at the time of course. The longest stretch without a win was 12 spins, ending on spin 185. The best one gave a return of 53 times the stake, none of them retriggered, and the session as a whole came back at 97.6%.