Lucha Maniacs Slot Review

Lucha Maniacs is a video slot from Yggdrasil Gaming with 5 reels and 20 paylines. This slot was originally released in April 2018 and can be played at online casinos such as PlayOjo, LeoVegas or Vera&John.

Theme and basic information

With Lucha Maniacs, Yggdrasil Gaming brings us a Mexican wrestler theme. The wrestlers are called Luchadors, they were colourful masks and look fierce.

The scene is nicely set: excited crowds in the background, the night is full of lights and stars and the background music makes us swing along. Visually, the slot is as well done as any Yggdrasil Gaming slot.

On the reels, we get four masked wrestlers in red, purple, blue and green as the high value symbols. The card suit symbols, corresponding in colour, are added as the low value symbols. The red and purple wrestlers are both 200 coins worth in a 5-of-a-kind win. Whilst the blue and green wrestlers pay out 175 coins for such a winning combination.

The golden ticket is the Wild in the game and the ring, where the fights take place, is the bonus symbol.

You can play this game from €0.08 to €100 or, with Golden Bet active, from €0.10 to €125.

Sticking it out in the base game

First of all, you have to decide whether or not to play with the Golden Bet in this game. All it does is cost a little extra and offer you another feature pick in the free spins. That tends to be worthwhile, however, and since the extra coins you pay per spin aren’t a strain on your budget, we recommend you active the Golden Bet. As it is, in Yggdrasil Gaming slots, this tends to be a good thing.

Alas, there isn’t much to tell about the base game. You’ll mostly be spinning away on the reels, waiting for the free spins to trigger. And since this is a volatile slot, you may have to budget for this.

The most exciting things will get during the base game is when you land two bonus scatters on the reels. That’s when the Poster Bonus game is triggered. You’ll be choosing among four posters of the four wrestlers, which will give you either between 20 and 80 coins (so, not much) or access to the free spins, starting you out on 7 spins with 3 feature picks (four, of course, if you play with Golden Bet).

So many options in the free spins

The other way to activate the free spins is by simply spinning three, four or five bonus scatters onto the reels, which will then give you 7, 15 or 30 free spins, always with 3 bonus picks (4 with Golden Bet).

Then you get to take 3 (or 4) picks among four collector’s cards on each turn, which will give you a selection of the following options:

• 2 or 4 extra free spins
• 1 or 2 wilds randomly added on each spin
• 1 sticky wild in the middle position on the second, third or fourth reel
• 3x multiplier on 1 wrestler
• 1 wrestler acts as a wild
• 1 wrestler becomes stacked on the reels
• the red and purple wrestler merge into one symbol creating a tag team
• the blue and green wrestler merge into one symbol creating a tag team

When a tag team is created, two players appear as one symbol and any additional features either of those players might have (such as coming stacked, becoming a wild or coming with a multiplier) will now be added to that joined symbol.

The right combination of those features can result in a fantastic free spin round with awesome wins. But, as usual, you can never be certain and might find your selection a little lacking.

In any case, things can get better, if you collect additionally bonus scatters during the free spins:

• 2 scatters give you 1 extra spin with 1 feature
• 3 scatters give you 2 extra spins with 2 features
• 4 scatters give you 3 extra spins with 3 features
• 5 scatters give you 4 extra spins with 4 features

It’s possible to re-trigger the extra spins multiple times and with all those extra features, you can look at amazing combinations.

Conclusion: A fun slot that focusses too much on the free spins

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) for Lucha Maniacs is 96.20%, which is good value. Considering that this is a very volatile slot, careful budgeting is in order, especially since there is no base game feature that will help you keep up your funds for a longer haul. The Poster Bonus game only offers a handful of coins here and there and simply isn’t enough, even if you trigger it every 10 or 20 spins (which is not necessarily the case).

The free spin feature can be totally awesome, but only if you have enough spins to begin with, get your four feature picks to start you out on and manage to retrigger more spins and add more features. You’ll want extra wilds and multipliers to get you anywhere, but there’s no guarantee that this will be the case. Honestly, as much potential as you can find in the free spins, they often don’t deliver. And here we would have preferred a little added bonus in the base game to keep us going longer. This slot may end up frustrating you more than it manages to excite.