Octopus Armada

Octopus Armada: Slot Overview

'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.' So said H. P. Lovecraft in Call of Cthulhu, a short story about a tentacled Great Old One from beyond our world, a horror so old and deep it defies human understanding. This was one of the first cultural references which arose when we were confronted by Octopus Armada, an online slot from provider Blue Guru Games. What followed were visions of tentacled extra-terrestrials heading to Earth to tear the two-armed primates to shreds as part of a sinister plan of cosmic domination.

In many ways, this is what players will find in Octopus Armada. They'll also find a game with an interesting back story, which revolves around a theory called Panspermia that life on Earth evolved off-world and was delivered here by a comet. The link between our home and the alien world has been judged as most likely the octopus, and since we've fudged this world up, it's only a matter of time until the octopus overlords return to rectify the karmic imbalance we've been racking up…

Slotting into the time-honoured tradition of alien visitation, Octopus Armada's base game takes place from the vantage point of the moon, where a 5-reel game matrix is backgrounded by UFOs on their way to our fragile blue planet. Switching to free spins brings the action even closer to home, where it's hard to tell what the aliens' intentions might be. Are they here to educate humanity, to help push us onto the next level of our evolution, maybe grow a few extra limbs, or just annihilate us and let Earth return to a non-human inhabited Garden of Eden?

Player's choice on the final scenario, and those interested, can ponder that question while selecting a stake from 30 p/c to $/€30 per spin. A medium volatile game, Octopus Armada has a maximum return value of 95.78% and uses 15 fixed paylines which pay both ways. This means landing at least 3 identical symbols on adjacent reels will pay a reward when landing from the leftmost reel to the right and the rightmost reel to the left.

As to symbols, Octopus Armada has ten regular pays and two types of wilds. On the lower half of the paytable can be found 9-A playing card tiles, worth 2.5-3.33x the bet for five of a kind, then higher value ray guns, circular spaceships, UFOs, rockets, and army men, worth 13.3-50 times the stake for a five of a kind hit.

Octopus Armada: Slot Features

Compared to the epic world-building going on in Octopus Armada, its features section feels a little underdeveloped by comparison. Be on the lookout for the octopus wild symbol. It can substitute for any normal pay symbol, and when one hits, it makes one or two copies of itself. New wilds are added in positions that would make the best winning combination possible.

Free Spins

If a wild symbol makes a copy of itself, and it turns out to be a golden version, then the bonus round is triggered. In total, 8 free spins are awarded, which use a wild collection/symbol removal system. When a wild symbol hits, it is added to a meter located above the reels. Bearing in mind, only naturally landing wilds are collected, not the copies. Every time 4 wilds are added to the meter, the lowest low pay and the lowest high pay symbol on the reels are removed. Moreover, 4 free spins are also awarded whenever four wilds are collected, meaning a maximum of 16 extra free spins can be won.

Octopus Armada: Slot Verdict

While you can sense the care and attention Blue Guru has poured into the interesting Panspermia story and then designing a set of immersive graphics to bring the concept to life, the gameplay didn't feel quite so developed. One of Blue Guru's aims is to tell stories with their games, and this they've achieved in Octopus Armada. A game so well named, it conjured up images of multi-armed adversaries sailing ships across seas or cruising celestial highways in search of interspecies conflict. When the game loaded, its Day of the Tentacle styling didn't disappoint, so the tee up could not have been better, and anticipation was riding high.

Several hundred spins later, enthusiasm had been blunted by the repetitiveness of Octopus Armada's gameplay. During the initial playthrough, it took a noticeably long time to eventually trigger the bonus round, and in the meantime, the spreading wild feature didn't have the oomph to fill the gaps. It was okay, and the pay both ways helped, but might it have benefited from an accompanying modifier or possessed some sort of multiplying element, perhaps? Not sure, but something felt missing. A repeat playthrough proved more fruitful, though. Spreading wild feature linked with the army man at one point to crack out a 500x+ base game win, and free spins triggered with a greater frequency the second time around. Like any slot, really, when the cards are falling your way, it's much easier to appreciate what a game has to offer.

What Octopus Armada offers is a slot for players keen to try their luck in a quirky B-movie-like setting while contemplating what might be out there, lurking on the galaxy's edge, beyond our knowledge. As far as alien interaction slots go, Octopus Armada has to work harder to impress since it doesn't have the name recognition or wealth of features found in Invaders Megaways or the nostalgic clout of Inspired Gaming's Space Invaders. It does this largely through its theme and presentation rather than a stack of features, so if you're down with the story, there is amusement here to be had; if not, Octopus Armada might come across as a tad underwhelming.