New Slots Round Up: 20th June – 26th June 2026

Blessings of Caishen from AvatarUX is a fairly simple slot with a Chinese theme. It’s 5 paylines on a 3 x 3 grid, but with the medium volatility rating, you’ll be landing wins more often than in the high volatility games that make up the majority of the slots market these days.

The main special feature is the Multiplier Wild, and if you click ‘Xpress’ you can see the 3 tiers of bonus buy available – the more you spend per spin, the higher the chance of landing a Multiplier Wild with a big multi attached. The best part of this game is that Wilds can appear in stacks of six, creating respins with each nudge down, offering plenty of chances for the Wild to be used as the stack moves.

Yokai means ghost, phantom, or monster in Japanese, and BGaming has pulled from Japanese folklore for its latest slot. Interestingly, the opening screen says the game’s unique art style has been developed with “renowned Lisbon-born street artist Gonçalo MAR.” Looks-wise, it does certainly have more character than your average slot.

It also has a pretty decent RTP at 97.00%. But what about the gameplay? It’s medium-high volatility with 20 paylines on a 5 x 3 grid, and you’ll be looking out for Wilds with multipliers attached – these feed into the global multiplier, represented by a moon in the top right. Then, in the free spins round, the global multiplier builds over the course of the feature and Wilds are sticky. Gameplay-wise it’s all been done before, but it’s a neat little project for those who like to appreciate good art in slots.

Another week, another Le slot with Le Sortudo from Hacksaw. The pace of these releases is quite remarkable at this point, but this one could divide fans because it’s the first in the series to use a 3 x 3 grid – that means fewer paylines and a much simpler overall feel. Still, some players may welcome the change from the usual formula. A little digging reveals that Sortudo means ‘The Lucky One’ in Brazilian Portuguese. Yes, Smokey the Raccoon appears to have found himself in Rio de Janeiro – I say that because there’s a giant statue on a hill in the background.

As for gameplay, the Golden Squares that normally define the series are absent this time around, with Hacksaw going for a mechanic where 3 or more Coin symbols or Jackpot Markers (or both together) can land naturally and award an instant payout. It feels more direct, in keeping with the rest of Le Sortudo. Rainbow symbols do still show up, but they simply kick off the Hold and Win round. So this is one for players who like simple 3-reelers, but those looking for something more complex will likely be disappointed.

Stars & Stripes: Hold and Win from BGaming has been developed around the Trueways mechanic, which is BGaming’s take on the Megaways formula – expanding reels that change the number of winning combinations on every spin. Depending on the reel layout, this can generate hundreds of thousands of ways to win.

The two bonus rounds are free spins with Multiplier Wilds and a Hold and Win round where you can win from the 3-tier jackpot. You’ll also have the chance to land some Cracker symbols, which split their square into two squares, allowing for more spaces for Coins to land. Of course, this game has a strong Americana theme just in time for Independence Day.

Despite being grossed out by the constant references to bodily fluids, I actually enjoyed Nolimit City‘s Seamen back in summer of last year. OK, that sounds wrong, but it’s the kind of sticky situation NLC like to put their players in with their edgy titles and references. The studio is like that friend who loves to say things for shock value, but in the past it’s managed to back up its edge with some highly playable games. Still, its reputation has been waning recently with some lower quality sequels that feel a bit like cash grabs.

Soaked by Seamen, is the new update to Seamen, and it ups the max win to 30,000x while maintaining the 96.04% RTP. In terms of mechanics, the core stuff is the same. This is still a game with much of the focus on individual squares with the Win Respins and Fire Frames at the forefront – so winning symbols will respin and build multipliers, while Fire Frames add multipliers too.

There are new additions like the Lucky Lighter and Banana, but at its core Soaked by Seamen feels mostly the same. Some fans will ask did we need this, while fans of the original might appreciate the tweaks. Those who are easily offended should steer clear, by the way.

Next up is The Great Herd from Backseat Gaming, one of two scatter pays titles this week. It has a North American theme filtered through the kind of basic but colorful lens that Backseat applies to most of its games. The idea is to land 5 or more of the same symbol type, anywhere on the board, and wins are augmented by the Golden Bull symbol. When this lands it means that the amount of winning symbols becomes the numerical multiplier for that spin’s winnings, but without it, you’ve just got a plain old scatter win with no multiplier.

Then in the bonus round, this global multiplier builds over the course of the feature, but you’ll still need the Golden Bulls to trigger it. So this slot a feel of Gates of Olympus, but whether you’ll like it probably depends on whether you’ll be into what I just described, cos there’s not too much else going on.

Secret Order from Hacksaw looks dramatic and exciting with its Illuminati-type theme, but the gameplay never really lives up to the atmosphere that’s presented. We’re working with 14 paylines but the main special feature is Colored Frames – frames that show up on random squares and apply a multiplier. The base game is actually pretty dry – I feel like normally Hacksaw would offer the chance to buy a Colored Frame on every spin, but you can’t even do that here, so you do have to grind through hoping one will land, and that it will be part of a winning line. For all of this to align is quite rare. The Colored Frames are sticky in the bonus round, so you might have more luck there, but this doesn’t feel up to the usual standard of a Hacksaw slot, in all honesty.

And now for a couple more from Hacksaw. Supreme Zeus is all ways pays on a 5 x 4 grid, and it features the Super Cascade mechanic where all symbols of the same type as the winning symbols get removed from the grid, making way for more to fall in their place. Then we have Coinways which is where Bronze, Silver, and Gold Coins can land, and – when they do in the shape of a winning line – the values will get plucked and assigned to the Coin Bar sat above the grid. Then all these values will be multiplied by each other to form a number to multiply your wager.

You can turn this feature on as a bonus buy, but it costs 500x the bet, so you will be upping the volatility of the game considerably. In the bonus round you have an increased chance of landing Coinways naturally. So Supreme Zeus is not a bad game per se and it has cool artwork, but it can be dry at times as you wait for Coins to come along.

Marlin Masters OG is the fourth from Hacksaw this week and it’s very heavily based on Marlin Masters from last year. That in turn ripped off Big Bass from Pragmatic, but I actually prefer Marlin Masters thanks to the bright and colorful design. It’s nice to feel like you’re basking under the sun on a turqoiuse ocean. Still, do we need an update that does very little apart from remove a row? Arguably, that’s a downgrade for most players. So if you’re a fan of fishing slots, maybe give this a go, while most other slots fans can avoid. Max win is only 7,500x too.

I’m starting to get a bit concerned that Hacksaw is spreading itself a little thin and may slowly be going the way of Nolimit. Do they just need these (almost pointless) remakes to keep them at the top of ‘New’ sections in casinos. Rather than loads of low quality releases, can’t we get back to the sparser release schedule of high quality titles that this studio used to be known for?

Game of the Week

Greedy Alice 2: Bigger Bites is the sequel to Greedy Alice from the end of 2024. Produced by Peter & Sons, the latter had a strong art direction and an interesting blurb:

“She goes down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, driven by endless greed. She controls the people there and creates chaos, all in a desperate attempt to gain ultimate power.”

Wait a minute – that’s not the Alice I know! Alice was looking to gobble up as many wins as possible in that scatter pays game, and each win doubled the multiplier in play – it reminded me a lot of Slotmill games like Emberfall and Ragnarok.

Well, Greedy Alice 2: Bigger Bites ups the ante further win a more unhinged art style that’s worth loading the game up just to see – it’s very much like the Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland, rather than the Disney one.

And the gameplay has been maintained for the most part, but we do have the addition of Multiplier Jump where the multiplier can bump up one position randomly. There’s also the Barrage Feature where 2 x 2 or 3 x 3 mystery blocks can land, with each square of the block transforming into the same symbol.

While the core mechanic isn’t completely original (especially with this being a sequel), chaining big wins together to reach higher multipliers is still a joy. Of course, this gets much easier in the free spins where the multiplier isn’t reset for each new spin. Once you get up into the higher numbers, the wins can be gigantic.

Yes, this is a fairly straightforward game at heart, but good games don’t need to be complex, and it’s good to see studios like Peter & Sons in the Game of the Week section more often. It makes up for the aforementioned dip in quality from NLC, Hacksaw etc.

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