Money Cart 4 Slot – Free Demo

Six reels that only pay when symbols stick

I can't say I got super thrilled, having viewed Relax Gaming's official promo clip of Money Cart 4. I played it at a stake of 6.00. Yet there was something alluring about it that held me awake that night — ok, not truly, but that grid of locked rows waiting to be unlocked certainly grabbed my attention. The grid opens on four rows and can reach eight. Visually, it indisputably appears a bit recognizable, and that makes me suspect Relax Gaming might have chosen to make use of a game engine that has already been round the block three times. Relax Gaming's other series in this vein is Money Train. Who knows, just guessing. The respin engine is the same one the series has used from the start. Whatever the case, when you play this one it's difficult not to recall Money Cart. It is the first instalment in the same series.

Money Cart 4 is a 6-reel slot with 4 to 8 rows and no paylines at all. There are no ways either, so nothing on the grid pays by combination. It takes bets between 0.10 and 60. There is no bonus buy on this one, so there is no price to weigh against what a trigger hands you. Core to this slot is the Re-Spins feature, which is not merely core but the entirety of it, as there is no traditional base game, and the two locked rows above and the two below the opening four are of considerable significance as well. In terms of volatility it seems to be rather high up on the scale.

Coins, not combinations

The game arrives with no set of low-win symbols and no medium-win symbols, and the reels bear only Bonus symbols. Nothing forms a combination here; a symbol pays because it carries a value and stays locked. Inside the feature the value symbols land at 1 to 10 coins, a coin being 0.1x the bet, so 10 coins is 1x and 100 coins is 10x. Feature symbols work on those coin values rather than paying anything themselves. The locked sum is paid at that rate at the close of the round.

Money Cart 4 also contains a set of feature symbols. Some of them act on the values already locked; others change how long the round runs. All of them are only obtainable during the Re-Spins feature, and I will describe them in the pertinent section below. An Upgrader is what turns a symbol already on the grid into that persistent version. Each of them can also emerge as a Persistent version. It acts again on every remaining respin instead of once.

The counter that will not stay down

Money Cart 4 is all about the respin feature. The round has three parts: a trigger, a locking phase, and a payout when the counter empties. It is the sole part of the game where you can land wins at all, as the main game does not exist. But I'm going to describe the Re-Spins themselves, which is the framework everything else sits in, before I discuss the feature symbols.

3 or more Bonus symbols launch the Re-Spins with 3 respins, and it's here that the locked rows come into effect. The grid begins on the central four rows. The two rows above those and the two below them start locked. To unlock another one you need to fill a row entirely, up to a maximum of four unlocks. With all four opened the grid runs eight rows, and a Collector then has that many more positions to gather from. Every symbol that lands locks in position and resets the counter back to 3. Mid-round the grid carries value symbols locked in position with a feature symbol sitting among them, waiting for its turn. The round continues as long as symbols keep arriving.

The feature finishes when the counter reaches zero, and the locked coin sum is then paid out at 0.1x the bet per coin. Only a Reset Plus adds to that counter outright; everything else just resets it to 3.

What each feature symbol does to the grid

The feature symbols may seem alike to one another at first. The pairing is deliberate: each collector and payer has an adjacent version that works on the neighbouring positions instead of the whole grid. But each is a distinct job altogether: a Collector adds every visible value to itself, while an Adjacent Collector does it for the eight adjoining positions only. That is where my best round came from — a Collector landing on the last respin with the grid already well filled. A Payer grants a value to all symbols. A Payer landing before a Collector is what produced 29.0x the stake on spin 207. An Adjacent Payer pays its neighbours only, a Sniper doubles 3 to 8 symbol values at random, and a Collector-Payer selects 3 to 5 symbols, pools their values and distributes the total back evenly. A Sniper doubling part of the board was worth 22.3x the stake on spin 408.

The remainder of the set changes the round itself rather than the values: an Arms Dealer converts up to 4 value symbols into feature symbols. A Necromancer restores 2 to 7 used non-persistent feature symbols, a Persistent Shapeshifter becomes a different feature each respin, and an Unlocker unlocks another row. An Unlocker opening a row that then filled was my 28.5x round on spin 245. A Reset Plus adds one respin and an Upgrader renders 1 to 3 feature symbols persistent.

Minty Slots Verdict: Thirty-nine triggers across 410 spins carried 70% of everything I won, and the roster of feature symbols is where the round is decided rather than the counter that measures it. The session as a whole gave back 85.9% and its best round was worth 49 times the stake.

After 410 spins at a 6.00 stake

What Relax Gaming might have stumbled with here is to instantly make it clear for players where the potential is and exactly how it's attained. Each feature symbol does something different to the grid, and there are a lot of them to learn. As you could probably tell from reading the review, it's a bit complex. The trigger condition and the counter are simple enough; it is the roster of feature symbols that carries the complexity. It should be noted that it makes more sense when actually playing it.

On the evidence of my own session, the feature is capable of landing a punch. It did that in a handful of rounds. Moreover, the total absence of a base game gives plenty of dead spins and nothing else, making the waiting sluggish and tedious without much dynamism. My longest run without a win was 16 spins. The Re-Spins feature triggers often, 39 times across my 410 spins and good for 70% of everything I won. Every one of those triggers dealt the same 3 respins to start with. But it turns a bit repetitive after a while, especially considering that my best round returned 49 times the stake and the session as a whole gave back 85.9%.