Play Demo
Stubby little worms in war paint crawl across a stone battlefield, hefting hammers, axes and spears under the eye of a fiery king worm. The whole thing carries a fond whiff of the old Worms artillery games from the turn of the millennium, though it is very much its own creation. Worms of Valor is a PopWins slot from AvatarUX, a Popscade to be exact, where every win grows the reels taller and a horizontal ZapReel along the top drips down extra prizes and wilds. Wins come by ways, and the real battle is the multiplier that climbs through the free spins.
Worms of Valor pays by ways, and the grid grows as you win. Every winning symbol pops and lifts its reel two rows taller, then fresh symbols cascade into the new space, and the run keeps going as long as wins keep landing. In the base round, a reel can climb to six high; once it tops out, new symbols still drop in, but the height holds. A single chain of wins can multiply the live ways many times over before it ends.
Reels 3, 4 and 5 are at maximum height and the ways counter is at 10,290 – the PopWins feature is doing its work.
Above the main grid sits the ZapReel, a single row of five cells that refreshes every spin, dealing its symbols from right to left. It can drop a regular symbol, a Wild that appears only up here and stands in for everything but the Bonus, or a Cash Prize that pays its printed value whenever there is a win on the reel below it. Two more rewards, a Multipop that stamps the same random multiplier on every symbol in the reel beneath it and a Reel Unlock that shoots a reel straight to full height, are saved for the free spins.
The Boost symbol is the ZapReel’s amplifier. When it lands, it improves whatever sits on the reel above, handing a random multiplier to a regular symbol or a Wild, or raising the value of a Cash Prize or a Multipop, before vanishing and letting the cells drop down to fill the gap. It cannot appear during a pop, so it only ever arrives on a fresh spin.
Three, four or five Bonus symbols open the free spins with six, eight or ten spins. The draw is a global multiplier that starts at 2x and increases with every win throughout the round, with no upper limit.
Each win lifts it by two to start, and the moment you fully unlock the reels, the round adds two spins and doubles that growth, so the multiplier then jumps by four each time.
The reels stretch as high as nine here, for as many as 59,049 ways, and because their height only partly resets between spins, a round that grows tall early can send the multiplier soaring.
Five routes into the action sit behind the XPress button.
Four buys climb in price and length, 70x for six free spins, 200x for eight, 500x for ten and 1,000x for the twelve-spin Bonus Ultra. The Ante Bet is the gentler route, adding 25% to each spin to double the chance of triggering the free spins the ordinary way.
You do not need symbols to line up here. Three or more of a kind on adjacent reels from the left pays wherever they sit, which is why a win can arrive from what looks like a scattered mess of worms. The ways counter on the left of the reels tracks how many combinations are live, and it climbs as the popscades stack the reels higher, this being a win-all-ways game of up to 59,049 ways at full height. Stakes run from €0.20 to €100, and every mode, the four buys and the Ante Bet, is open to try in the free play demo.
This is a high-volatility slot, and the cap sits at 10,000x the bet; reach that in a round and it closes out there with the cap paid. The multiplier is the thing to watch, since the base round keeps wins modest and the free spins are where they multiply. The return to player is 95.99%, shown in full in the in-game information.
| Symbol | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|
| King worm (Super High) | 3x | 3.5x | 4x |
| Warrior worms (red, orange, pink) | 1.4x | 1.8x | 2x |
| Lesser worms (blue, green) | 1x | 1.4x | 1.8x |
| High weapons (hammer, axe, spear) | 0.5x | 0.7x | 0.9x |
| Low weapons (shield, dagger) | 0.25x | 0.5x | 0.7x |
| A, K, Q | 0.2x | 0.25x | 0.3x |
| J, 10, 9 | 0.1x | 0.2x | 0.25x |
| Wild | ZapReel only – substitutes for all symbols except the Bonus | ||
The multiplier is the heart of Worms of Valor, and almost everything good about the game flows through it. It sits dormant in regular play, where the popscades and the ZapReel tick along pleasantly without ever paying much, then comes alive in the free spins, climbing with every win and doubling its growth the moment the reels max out. Get there early and a round can run riot; get there late, or not at all, and the same buy can stall. It earns a 3.7, held back by visuals that sit a step behind the studio's best.
Worms of Valor drops you into a stone arena where chunky worms in war paint do battle with hammers, axes and spears in a bright cartoon style, a fiery crowned worm presiding over the top of the reels. It pulls at a particular nostalgia, the old Worms artillery games of the late nineties and early two-thousands, all stubby combatants and oversized weapons; this is its own thing, but the throwback is a nice touch. The sound sells it, heavy thuds as the symbols crash into place and a soft wind-chime shimmer as they clear. The win rule takes a moment to click, since three matching worms on any adjacent reels pay whether they line up or not, and a few early wins landed from boards that looked like nothing at all.
In regular play, the game is all motion. Every win pops the worms and stretches the reels taller, the ways counter ratcheting up as the board grows, while the ZapReel along the top keeps dealing fresh symbols and the odd Wild or Cash Prize into the mix. The Boost symbol is the busiest helper, landing often to slap a small multiplier onto whatever sits above it, usually a 2x or 3x. None of it pays heavily on its own, but it gives the early going a constant sense of something building, which is just as well, because what it builds toward is the bonus.
The free spins are another thing entirely. We bought in at 500x for the Bonus Premium and its ten spins, the arena flushing yellow and windy behind the reels as the trumpets struck up. Reel Unlocks came thick and early, maxing the reels by the second spin, which flipped the multiplier’s growth from two to four and set it climbing fast. By halfway, it was turning small wins into €80 hits, and with something landing on almost every spin, it kept feeding itself, reaching 40x and then 46x by the closing spins. One late result alone paid €751.40, and the round closed at €1,2232.20, the wins multiplying up from the €1 base stake to land well clear of the €500 the Premium buy had cost, the kind of bonus the whole design points toward.
We also tried the dearer 1,000x Bonus Ultra and its twelve spins, and it never caught light, the Reel Unlocks staying away, so the multiplier crawled at its slower rate, and the wins refused to come. Cash Prizes kept appearing on the ZapReel with no win beneath them to pay out, and a lone €200 hit aside, the round limped to €206, a fraction of the Premium’s haul for double the outlay.
One quibble beyond the luck, even with turbo mode engaged, the popscades take their time to play through, in the base round and the bonus alike. Some players will enjoy the drawn-out, building action, those who like to rattle through spins may not. Visuals aside, it is a likeable, well-built slot, and when that multiplier really takes off the free spins put on a real show, making Worms of Valor very well worth a look for anyone happy to let a round take its time.
