Invaders from the Planet Moolah Slot – Free Demo

The saucers take the cows that just paid

Light & Wonder is a firm that is skilled at guarding secrets when it comes to new games. That is enormously irritating for an inquisitive writer like myself, although, I must concede, for self-serving reasons. Why, you may ask yourself? For those of you who don't realise, Light & Wonder has been ruling the casino floor for a very lengthy time. Even with newcomers putting up a battle, Light & Wonder's standing in the top remains largely uncontested thank's to cabinet classics that made the leap online, and these are all hugely beloved games that still stands the test of time.

Light & Wonder is a slot producing plant with huge biceps, capable of building some of the most identifiable games you'll ever come across. There is no doubt about that fact, whatever there is to be stated regarding the mathematical construction, which has been of fluctuating quality as of late. That is why I can't help but wet my pants when I see new games catalogued on the company's roadmap, and ya'll know how much I love slots. Almost as much as I love playing them, I love writing about them. Enough of the small-talk though — time to take a glance at Invaders from the Planet Moolah, launched back on July 4, 2013.

Taking a step back to view the slot, I'm definitely getting some odd Saturday-morning cartoon vibes. Perhaps that is because of the cartoonish styling along with the alien invasion theme. There are a whole heap of understated things going on both in active and idle mode: a row of flying saucers suspended above the reels, tractor beams dropping down, cows illuminated inside them. The beams are how the cascades are animated, with paid symbols destroyed on the spot and the survivors dropping into the gaps. It's a charming and agreeable theme as you will see, and as the title of the game implies, the tale takes place on a farm, with a backdrop of a green meadow and a yellow moon. The Feature trades that in for a red planet, magenta reel frames and green symbol tiles.

The Minty Summary: Fifty minutes at a flat 1.00 left me 77.80 up, and every bit of that came from two free-spin rounds worth 119 and 33 times the stake. The 177 spins I counted around them returned 101.40 on 177.00 staked. The cascade counter is the whole game: it reaches three over and over and stops there, and the one time it went to six it paid for the afternoon.

Thirty times the stake sits on the saucer tile

The low-value symbols here are depicted by assorted bits of farmyard junk - chickens, milk, a mailbox, and an outhouse - and here's where it turns a bit less orthodox. Chickens and milk are worth 4 times the stake for five on a line, the mailbox and outhouse 3.2 times. The top payer is the JACKPOT symbol, a flying-saucer symbol. No combination of it paid at any point across my fifty minutes. It is a simple line-pay symbol and not a progressive or a scatter, and landing 5 across a complete pay line delivers a 30 times the stake win. Line pays have to begin on the leftmost reel and run on adjacent reels, and only the highest winner is paid per winning combination. Second in the pay order is MIXED, a line pay created from any blend of the five character symbols - GRANDPA, DOG, COWGIRL, GRANDMA and MAN - worth 20 times the stake for five. Below that sit BARN, TRAILER and TRUCK, paying 10, 8 and 6 times the stake respectively for five. The WILD is a cow. It stands in for every other symbol on the grid. It shows up on reels 2 to 5 only, never on reel 1. Full stacks of three on one reel turned up constantly, and inside the first feature two adjacent reels carried stacks at the same time.

Four cascades in a row is the price of entry

There is no Scatter symbol involved in Invaders from the Planet Moolah. The cascading itself runs on every spin regardless, continuing until no new paytable combination is formed. But there is a conventional type bonus feature where you are introduced to a new backdrop and a new reel set altogether. Winning combinations on those alternate reels are identical to the base game ones. Instead of scatters, the cascades do the triggering: symbols tumble in from above, winning symbols are eliminated and the survivors descend, and successive cascades within one spin award free spins:

4 cascades - 7 free spins.
5 cascades - 10 free spins.
6 cascades - 15 free spins.
7 cascades - 25 free spins.
8 or more cascades - 50 free spins.

The neat part here is that the ladder is traced down the left rail, three saucer positions and then the rungs. The rungs are marked 7, 10, 15, 25 and 50, and every consecutive cascade in a spin lights the next position up. So the trigger is readable on screen before it happens.

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Say you land six successive cascades, and this will grant 15 free spins on the alternate reel set. That is exactly how my first round opened. The bet per line and the active pay lines are fixed to the triggering spin. The free spins cost nothing themselves: the balance sat frozen at 997.60 for the whole round and only moved when the total credited at the end. Now, if during one of those free spins you land five successive cascades, another 10 free spins will be added to the count remaining. Both of my rounds picked up a retrigger of that exact size, and the first took a second one worth 7 on top of it, for 32 free spins in all. If, on the other hand, you are on a spin that did not trigger anything, the Feature may still trigger at random at the close of it. That will hand you 7 free spins. I never saw that fire once — both of my entries came off the cascade counter.

Two rounds carried the whole session

Did I enjoy playing the game? Both yes and no — it's clear that Invaders from the Planet Moolah is a "commercial" game. I opened at 1,000.00 and closed at 1,077.80, up 77.80 on the session. It is built to caters to a wider audience rather than winning hardcore slot players over. The two feature rounds paid 152.00 between them, which is that gain and more besides. On the other hand, the same thing could be stated about a lot of cabinet ports when they landed online, from Heidi's Bier Haus to Action Bank. Those turned out to be hits in every segment of the market.

Everyone loves cascades. 70 of my 177 counted spins paid something. Here you certainly get a full good helping of them, but what troubled me a little bit is that it can be maddeningly tough to get the counter past three, even though it gets there over and over. The longest stretch I counted was 102 spins in which it never once reached four, eighteen minutes of unbroken play. My own fifty minutes ran at 25 lines and 0.04 a line, a flat 1.00 a spin from the first frame to the last. There was also a 65-spin run straight after the first feature with no trigger in it at all. Across 177 counted spins the base game yielded 101.40 on 177.00 staked, and the Feature emerged exactly twice, paying 119 times the stake and 33 times the stake. The gap between the two rounds came down to five-of-a-kind MIXED lines, two of them in the first and none in the second. The main game itself can also turn a bit dull while waiting for the feature to trigger. Dry runs of four and five blank spins in a row were routine, and the best base-game spin of the whole session was 20 times the stake.

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It does not help that wild cows resting past the third reel cannot begin a line at all, and one of the frames I kept has six of them on screen and an empty win box. The leftmost rule caught the JACKPOT symbol the same way, with three of them adjacent on reels 3, 4 and 5 and nothing paid for it. Moreover, although there is space for retriggers stacking the free spins up during the course of a round, the fact that I never witnessed a cascade run past six, against a 750x max win per spin, is not too thrilling either.