Danger High Voltage

Danger High Voltage by Big Time Gaming

Danger High Voltage by Big Time Gaming is our online slot game of the month for November 2017.  Released in May 2017, this slot is themed on the 2003 Electric Six hit song of the same name:

Fire in the disco
Fire in the Taco Bell
Fire in the disco
Fire in the gates of hell

…and sure enough, tacos, bells and disco balls are amongst the symbols on the reels!

Big Time Gaming is a relatively new company, but run by people with years of experience in the industry.  It has quickly carved out a name for itself as a maker of high octane, super high variance slots and as well as Danger High Voltage itself, these include Bonanza, Starquest and the recently released White Rabbit.  Big Time Gaming slot games generally use their Megaways system which creates massive winning opportunities (up to 248,832 in the bonus round of White Rabbit), but Danger High Voltage doesn’t – it has a mere 4096 ways to win (standard for a 6 x 4 array).

Back in 2016 someone in Big Time Gaming’s marketing department had an absolute stroke of genius; they realised that high volatility gaming could be made into a spectator sport via the Twitch streaming platform.  Twitch is best known for live streams of video games such as World of Warcraft and Call of Duty, but it is also where slot players broadcast (prior to posting edited highlights on YouTube) with live commentary via the Twitch chat feature.  Bonanza was the first game that Big Time Gaming produced with Twitch in mind, but for the launch of Danger High Voltage they really made the most of it:

• The game had an official release via live stream the day before it was made generally available to play.
• A week later (after players had had a few days to figure the slot out) there was an official Stream Betting event allowing players from a partner casino to place bets on the outcome of 500 live streamed spins of the game – creating the sort of buzz that there is around a horse race.
• You could even buy the T-shirt !

So does Danger High Voltage live up to the hype? It certainly does! – if you like high variance slots, that is.

4096 ways sounds like a lot of ways to win but in fact wins in the base game are relatively infrequent and usually very small; even on 6 of a kind there are only two symbols (the skull and the bell) that pay out more than the player’s original stake.

The base game includes two types of Full Reel Wild – Wild Fire and Wild Electricity (which has a 6x multiplier) – and these appear on reels 2 -5 only.

While these look like stacked wilds, actually they are not – the wild covers the entire reel but functions as just one symbol rather than as a stack of symbols, effectively reducing the reel’s height to one and therefore reducing the number of possible ways to win on that spin.  Many spins that include full reel wilds lose and winning spins that include them can still be pretty disappointing.  The spin below looks like it ought to be a big winner, but actually only 4 combos count – 2 sets of 3 kings and 2 sets of 4 nines.  The 6x multiplier is in effect but the wins it is multiplying are very small.

It IS possible to pick up big wins in the base game on the right combination of 6x multiplier wilds with high scoring symbols or full reels of the same symbol but this is a rare occurrence – that’s high variance for you!

The real high octane excitement in Danger High Voltage comes in the bonus rounds – there is a choice of two.  The bonus is triggered by spinning three or more of the tattoo scatter symbol.

In the High Voltage bonus round the player starts with 15 free spins (these can be retriggered if three or more scatters come up again during the free spins).  The High Voltage Full Reel Wild, which appears on reels 2-5, multiplies any wins in which it appears by 11 to 66 depending on what is lit up.  Effectively this bonus round has an even lower frequency of wins than the base game (as only one High Voltage Full Reel Wild appears at a time) but with the potential for them to be much bigger – if only the queen had shown up on reel 3, this spin would have paid out 44x on 6 of a kind (although this would still only amount to 33x stake).  Again, the right combination of multiple and/or high scoring symbols is needed to get a big win.

In the Gates of Hell bonus round, it’s all about collecting sticky wilds to build up to big wins and many players find this sort of crescendo very exciting.  Because of this it can be much more exciting to watch than the other bonus round and indeed, the Danger High Voltage big win videos mostly seem to be from Gates of Hell .

Before the 7 free spins start, a single big reel spins to determine which symbol is to become the sticky wild (and this is one of the very few times you want to spin a low paying symbol rather than a high paying one). As with every other special feature of Danger High Voltage, the sticky wilds appear on reels 2-5 only.  Each sticky wild counts as a symbol in its own right so although wins tend to be small at the start of the round because of there being no multiplier, as the number of sticky wilds in play builds up creating more opportunities for winning combos the wins also build up – in both frequency and size.  If a reel is completely filled with sticky wilds, 3 more free spins are awarded; the really big wins are to be had when this happens with more than one reel.

The theoretical RTP of Danger High Voltage is 95.67% but such is the nature of high variance that you’d have to play hundreds of thousands of spins or even more for actual RTP to settle down to that. In the meantime, you could win thousands of times your stake – or lose your shirt!

Danger High Voltage is only missing one thing to make it even more exciting and that is Feature Drop, which was introduced in the subsequent release White Rabbit and allows an impatient player to buy an (expensive) instant trigger of the bonus round for the ultimate thrill.

PS.  We weren’t joking about the T shirt!  If you want to buy one – either for Danger High Voltage or for another Big Time Gaming slot – they are available at the Big Time Gaming shop with proceeds going to charity.