Nitro Circus Slot Review

Nitro Circus is a video slot from Yggdrasil Gaming with 5 reels and 25 paylines. This action-packed game has been released in November 2018 and can be played at online casinos such as Casumo, Dunder or LeoVegas.

Theme and basic information

This Yggdrasil slot has been announced months in advance and was highly anticipated. Yggdrasil has made a deal with Nitro Circus to make a slot based on them. You’ll be forgiven, if you’ve never heard of Nitro Circus. We hadn’t either. But you may have seen what they do somewhere on television, even without knowing what they’re actually called. Nitro Circus comprises a bunch of daredevils taking all kinds of things on wheels (let’s keep it general, because they do attach wheels to sofa chairs and such things) and take them down ramps to perform daring stunts. When you play this game, you’ll see loads of it in the background and in the mini game.

Thus, we get a theme here that is not just unusual in and of itself, but downright outlandish for Yggdrasil. It doesn’t even look like a typical Yggdrasil slot or sound like one, for that matter. It’s loud, colourful and action-packed. The crowd is roaring in the background, fireworks are ignited, and the Nitro Circus crew can be found on the reels along with their mandatory helmets.

The guy with the red cap is worth the most in a 5-of-a-kind win here. You’ll get 500 coins for him. His fellow daredevils follow far behind with only 100 to 140 coins for such a winning combination. And the three helmets are obviously the low-paying symbols.

Whether you like this sort of sporty theme or not, the graphics, animations and sound are well done and set the mood for loads of actions.

You can play this game from €0.10 to €125, making it suitable for just about all budgets.

Base Game

There’s much happening in this slot and it never gets boring. The base game will see you chase after the bombs on the reels. Get two of them and you trigger the Nitro Blast, which is the main feature in the base game. You’ll be taken to a different screen where 5 bombs with various items on them show up. Mostly, you will collect a card with one of the special vehicles (mini car, sofa chair, rocking horse or bathtub). Once you have five of one, the Nitro Jump is triggered with this particular vehicle.

You’ll be collecting for quite some time, though. Additionally, you may be able to trigger between 10 and 30 free spins here or receive a number of random wilds on your next spin.

Bonus Features

There are two bonus games here and the free spins are not only very hard to get but also much more boring anyway. But let’s start with them anyway. You can either activate them by getting them via the Nitro Blast feature or by collecting three or more bombs on the reels.

Three bombs will give you 10 free spins, four will give you 20 free spins and five will give you 30 free spins. This is where the party really gets going as you spin through your free rounds. And as a special feature, one Nitro Bomb is enough to give you a choice of the following:

• A 1x multiplier
• Between 1 and 3 additional spins
• Re-triggering 10 to 30 free spins
• A card for one of the special vehicles
• Random Wilds

You will get the Nitro Bombs here or there, but they’re not likely to be plentiful.

The much more interesting feature is the Nitro Jump. The main way to trigger it is to get the letters ‘N’, ‘I’, ‘T’, ‘R’ and ‘O’ on the five reels in the base game. That happens with surprising frequency. You get to choose among three vehicles that are always available: FMX, BMX and Scooter. To be able to pick among the other four (rocking horse, sofa chair, bathtub and mini car) you need to collect the cards, which, as already mentioned, automatically launches the Nitro Jump as soon as you have five of them.

Each vehicle has different capabilities, which are marked with the number of stars behind each. You choose the vehicle based on the advantages you’re looking for:

• Tricks: Get higher coin wins
• Boost: Better chance for a higher multiplier in the last jump
• Size: Higher chance of picking up more special symbols

Once you’ve picked your vehicle, you will get three warm-up jumps, which will earn you coins (based on skill and landing) and where you might collect special symbols (extra coins, speed boost, multipliers, collection cards for the vehicles).

On the final jump, you can boost your vehicle once more (once, twice or thrice), which will determine the risk you take on the last jump. Boosting once will probably mean you get a lower final multiplier but at least you won’t crash (which voids the multiplier and only adds a crash bonus). Medium risk increases your multiplier and you may or may not crash. High risk (three boosts) gives you higher multipliers, but the risk of crashing is also high.

For instance, don’t boost the scooter three time because that will almost certainly end in a crash. But we once jumped with the sofa chair and scored 40x multiplier on the final jump without crashing. That was pretty cool.

Conclusion: An action-packed slot that take a while to find its rhythm

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) for Nitro Circus is 97%, which is an excellent value and among the best you can get in just about any slot. Truth be told, it took us a while to get into the game. It was slow going in the beginning and we waited quite a while for the first Nitro Jump. But after 500 or so spins, we managed to launch the mini game regularly.

It took more than 500 spins to see the free spins for the first time and that happened via the Nitro Blast. Another time we triggered them with three Nitro Bombs. But playing more than a thousand spins, we only played them those two times.

The Nitro Jump, however, was always good fun and always different. You’ll end up playing all vehicles, though it takes quite a while to collect those cards and try out the special ones. In the end, we finished our session with more than our initial budget and have nothing to complain about here. Don’t worry too much about the free spins, the mini game is more fun anyway.