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Slot Review: Achilles

Have you heard the saying that something is someone’s Achilles’ Heel? Legends has it that the Greek warrior Achilles was dipped in a magical river during infancy, making him invincible on the field of battle. The only problem was that he was held by his heel during this dipping, making him vulnerable in that one spot. We’re tempted to make the easy joke about Real Time Gaming, and slots that may or may not represent a weakness in their design department. But, to be perfect honest, we simply were not remarkably impressed with Achilles, the slot game based on the mythological Greek hero. This five-reel, twenty-payline online slot represents a fairly recent offering from RTG, which has been struggling for market share in the face of strong competition from other software providers. There are simply too many other pokies based on Grecian heroes for a weak contender to get far in the battle for the hearts and minds of players.

According to the lore of Greek gods and the heroes below them, Achilles became one of the great heroes of the Trojan War, and get killed by an arrow to the heel. You wouldn’t know any of this from playing Achilles’ eponymous slot, which offers very little in the way of intrigue. The reels feature pictures of the Trojan horse, Helen of Troy, a horse, a flag, and a shield. The colors are dull and the action is not very lively. This is amazing, considering that the game has an autospin feature, free practice round, an attached progressive jackpot in the RTG tradition, and free spins.

The layout of the game takes the fairly boring form of a deserted island. Poker symbols make up the majority of the icons on the reels. In our very frank opinion, this trope is a design weakness that represents a lack of creativity on the part of the game’s designers. There is very little to personalize or catch the eye in this game. Picking what online slot to play is not so much unlike buying a house, in that there is such a thing as “curb appeal” – the game has to catch the eye on first glance for players to take an interest and be willing to part with their hard-earned cash. Achilles is definitely lacking in that intangible “it” factor that makes us want to spin the reels of a poker machine repeatedly, and its prizes aren’t even substantial enough to make up for the other lacking areas.

Coin values start at one penny (a nice boon for players sporting a small bankroll), and go up to five dollars. Max coins is set at a value of twenty, or one coin per payline. That makes the highest per-spin wager one of one hundred dollars. The highest in-game jackpot is one of five thousand coins, or twenty-five thousand dollars when one plays the max bet. There are wild, scatter, and bonus opportunities that can boost that relatively small top prize. That is, if you actually care to stick around and play this game for a while.

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