The trick in Mascot Gaming’s Poseidon The Deep King slot is that the same cascade pays on a different multiplier scale once you are in the bonus. In regular play, every win sets off a Rockfall, clearing the winning symbols and refilling the gaps, and each fall pushes the multiplier up a ladder marked x1, x2, x3, x5, x10. The reels stand anywhere from two to seven symbols tall, for anywhere from 64 to 117,649 ways on a spin. Trigger the free spins and the game moves underwater to Poseidon’s stone throne, where the ladder is restrung to run from x2 up to x25 while the rest carries on as before.
The 6 reels reach a new height on every spin, and the number of ways to win grows with them. The more symbols in view, the more routes matching icons have to connect across neighbouring reels. Rather than fixed paylines, the count runs from a slim 64 up to 117,649 at the top, displayed live on the plaque in the top-right corner and updating with every drop. The Poseidon wild covers any paying symbol to finish a way, and it appears on every reel but the first.
The Rockfall is the engine the rest of the game sits on. Any win, in normal play or the bonus, sweeps its winning symbols away and lets new ones cascade into the spaces, carrying on while more wins form. Each fall also moves you up a rung of the multiplier ladder on the left of the reels, with the multiplier resetting to x1 at the start of every new spin. The multiplier showing when the wins dry up is then applied to the round, with the main-game ladder topping out at x10.
Land 4 or more trident scatters and 12 free spins open beneath the surface. The grid and the Rockfall behave exactly as they do above water, with a lone twist that shapes the round.
The multiplier ladder is rebuilt to run x2, x5, x10, x15 and x25, so every win now begins on x2 at the lowest, and a long run can hit a height the everyday grid has no rung for.
Also, if you bring in 4 more tridents inside the round, another 12 spins are added. The rules state that each trident beyond the first 4 is worth 3 more, but we were credited with 12 extra during our demo. Regardless, a good bonus keeps feeding itself!
After any win, the Risk Feature lights up a card prompt beside the reels, giving you the option to gamble that win on its wheel. The wheel is divided into multiplier segments, blank wedges and arrows leading to tighter rings with higher multipliers. Land on a blank segment and the win is lost; hit a multiplier and it is applied to your current total, after which you can either collect the new amount or gamble it again.
The multipliers can take the win as high as 1000x the total bet, while the arrow segments let you progress inward to rings with bigger potential rewards. You can stop at any point and keep the amount you’ve built, making the feature entirely optional.
The game offers 12 free spins for 150x your bet, letting you buy the bonus on demand. You can change the stake on the buy screen, with the price adjusting accordingly, and the free spins then play at the bet you paid for.
A win on Poseidon The Deep King is a run of matching symbols on neighbouring reels, read from the first reel along, and only the best way per symbol pays. Because the reels vary in height, the number of ways changes with each spin. Multiply the six heights together, and you have the count, so a set of reels at full height works out to 117,649, while the shortest possible one leaves just 64.
Stakes range from £0.20 to £10.00 per spin, set on the bet panel, and holding the spin button puts the game into a faster mode, with a separate control cycling through Normal, Quick, and Turbo speeds.
No currency shows on the reels, so the values stand in as plain credits, and every part of the game can be sampled in free play before you stake. Volatility is rated High.
Figures are multiples of a £1.00 spin, counted from 3 of a kind up to 6, before any Rockfall multiplier is applied.
| Symbol | 6 of a kind | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sea Queen | 12.50x | 4.50x | 1.75x | 0.80x |
| Red Crown | 6.25x | 2.75x | 1.25x | 0.60x |
| Amphora of Gold | 3.25x | 1.50x | 0.75x | 0.40x |
| Green Longship | 2.00x | 1.00x | 0.55x | 0.35x |
| Pearl in the Shell | 1.25x | 0.60x | 0.35x | 0.25x |
| Spade | 0.80x | 0.40x | 0.20x | 0.20x |
| Heart | 0.60x | 0.35x | 0.20x | 0.15x |
| Blue Diamond | 0.50x | 0.30x | 0.20x | 0.15x |
| Club | 0.45x | 0.25x | 0.15x | 0.10x |
The five picture symbols sit well clear of the weakest four.
Poseidon The Deep King runs its Rockfall cascades on two multiplier ladders, and the free spins are what bring the game alive. The same grid and cascading wins return with a multiplier ladder that runs much higher, allowing a bonus round to build well beyond the main game's x10 ceiling. Beneath the spectacle sits a 95.99% RTP, dropping to 95.15% when using the buy and the wheel, with volatility rated High. A 10.00 maximum stake keeps the game from competing with the biggest-staking slots, but the presentation and wheel give it more personality than most. Just decide early whether you want the wheel involved, because its button appears after every win.
The reels earn attention before a scatter ever lands. On one plain spin during this review we opened at 2.05, and the falls kept finding more matches, each clearing the winners and bringing fresh symbols in, the ladder rising as they went. By the time it settled the win read 36.85 with the ladder sitting on x10.
The free spins are where the room opens up. Reaching them takes 4 tridents, and our second visit was a bought one that paid 749.00 from a single 1.00 stake across 36 spins, two retriggers extending the round as the ladder pushed to x25, though the symbols under that top multiplier brought only 75.00. That raised ladder is the whole difference, since the grid and the Rockfall stay put, yet every win now lands on a x2 floor or better and the longest chains climb further than the everyday game can. The 22,500x top win is built for this exact round, the moment the falls and the biggest multipliers arrive together.
Above the surface, the reels sit among Greek pillars and breaking waves, coins spilt over the rocks from tipped amphorae. Waves crash in the background every so often, each spin turns on a muffled, submerged note, and every symbol settles onto a small splash and a rattle of pebbles, under a soundtrack that sounds big and mythic from the opening spin.
Set off the bonus, and the whole scene sinks into the drowned ruins where the god keeps his throne, the soundtrack swelling as it drops. It is a good looking game with audio to match, and it holds the eye whether a win lands or not. The one rough edge is a display bug on the build we played. Some symbols landed as empty tiles before their artwork caught up, the trident scatter showing as a bare box and the top-paying sea queen doing it most often, each filling in with the full design a moment later. It never cost a win, but it is the kind of thing a new release usually irons out.
Offering a gamble on almost any win is not something most cascade games bother with, and it changes how a result feels. A Rockfall run that was lower than you hoped for, or even one that you would happily bank, now has that prompt beside it, asking if you want to put the lot on the wheel for a shot at more. The bigger multipliers are only available if you keep gambling your growing win and land the right segments, keeping the highest rewards out of reach unless you’re willing to keep pushing your luck.
It did us few favours. Our 36.85 run went onto the wheel and edged up toward the x3 segment that would have made it 110.55, only to lose momentum and slip back a notch, and the win was gone. A smaller go on a 1.00 result did the reverse, drifting toward a miss and rolling back onto an x3 to pay 3.00. The hardest to watch was a bought free spins round of 169.80 that we put up and lost in full. Three turns of the wheel across the session, and only the smallest came back.
