Beach Invaders: Slot Overview

Most people know Space Invaders (and yes, it even has an online slot version) as the 1978 arcade classic where you blast descending rows of invaders as they creep closer to the bottom of the screen—Earth, presumably. But an alien takeover of the seaside? That’s now a thing, courtesy of veteran provider NetEnt and its online slot Beach Invaders. It’s a lively, feel-good title where, rather than fighting off hostile ships, the vibe is more like: “Let’s party, earthling.”

The extraterrestrials have chosen their location well, too. They’ve rolled up to a thatch-roof bar beside a gorgeous turquoise sea, with golden sand and warm blue skies overhead. On the home screen, there’s a seagull carrying what appears to be a three-cupped bikini in its beak—maybe we’re mistaken—but it does bring to mind that “mutant” moment from the Arnie film Total Recall: “Baby, you make me wish I had three hands.” Either way, it’s a pretty great beach to invade, and if the aliens are happy to share it, we’re not complaining. A laid-back, poolside Singapore Sling mood with a Dick Dale-esque twang helps complete the scene as well.

Set your stake, and in Beach Invaders the choices run from 10 p/c up to $/€10 per spin. That’s not the widest spread for a NetEnt slot, though the tighter top end is said to be one reason the game can still offer a strong maximum win. Pick carefully as well, because Beach Invaders includes a Progress bar that is locked to each bet level. Listed as highly volatile—even if it may not always feel that way in practice—the theoretical return is 96.17%, and there are no feature buys or ante bets included this time.

For symbols, green alien-style 10 through A card ranks form the low pays, while the premium set is made up of 4 alien-ish cocktails, each with its own brand of amusing gross-out charm. The action plays out on a 5×4 gaming grid with 30 paylines, paying for matching symbols from left to right starting at the leftmost reel. Land a full 5-of-a-kind line and you’ll receive 1.5 to 10 times the bet on low pays or 20 to 50 times the bet on the high pays. With wilds able to land on all reels, they can form wins on their own worth up to 100x the bet for 5 OAK, or wilds can substitute for any regular paying symbol.

Beach Invaders: Slot Features

Wild symbols are effectively the headline act in Beach Invaders, and they come with a couple of useful tricks in both the base game and free spins—namely expanding, shifting, and multiplying.

Expanding Wild

Any time a wild symbol lands, it expands to cover all positions on that reel. As noted earlier, wilds can appear on any of the five reels.

Locked Wild Progress Bar

Beside the reels you’ll see a progress bar featuring 4 milestones. Each milestone indicates the number of spins wilds will lock on to the reels for after they land and expand. When ice cube patches show up on regular pay symbols, those ice cubes are collected to help charge the progress bar. Fill the whole bar, and on the next spin, at least 1 expanded wild is guaranteed to land and will be locked for 4 spins. After this triggers, the progress bar resets.

Free Spins

Get 3 scatter symbols anywhere on the screen to trigger 10 free spins, where Shifting Wilds with Increasing Multipliers can occur. During free spins, Expanded Wilds shift to the reel on the left and move one position up or down at random on each following spin, scaling down its height by one position size. Once a wild reaches 1×1, it disappears on the next spin. After the first shift, an Increasing Multiplier is activated, which grows by +1 with every subsequent shift. If a new wild lands on top of a shifting wild, it inherits the multiplier as it expands. If multiple multipliers are part of the same win, only the highest one is used.

Beach Invaders: Slot Verdict

With a brutal heat wave scorching parts of Europe at the time of writing, it’s hardly shocking that even aliens have decided the beach is the place to be. They come across as a pretty relaxed bunch, giving Beach Invaders an inviting, kick-off-your-shoes-and-feel-the-sand atmosphere. NetEnt has long had a soft spot for extraterrestrial themes too, as seen in titles like Space Wars and the more experimental, feature-packed slot Space Wars 2 Powerpoints (no, not Microsoft PowerPoint), though this time the visitors seem a lot friendlier. At least, there’s no mention of war.

Beach Invaders isn’t as feature-stuffed as Space Wars 2, but it still has some solid points in its favour. Expanding Wilds are typically a plus, even if they sometimes seemed to show up more often on the right side of the grid. The helpful part is that the progress bar doesn’t reset until it’s fully completed, so you can hit multiple Expanding Wilds while the bar sits on 2 or 3, receive that number of spins with sticky Expanded Wilds, and the bar still won’t reset. That keeps the base game moving along and adds a bit of momentum while you wait for free spins to arrive. Then, once you’ve got an Expanded Wild shifting around the place, the obvious upgrade is to attach a climbing multiplier—exactly what Beach Invaders delivers. It’s a little disappointing that wilds eventually shrink away and vanish, and at times it can be difficult to picture the slot consistently feeling like it has more than 500x potential, even though it advertises a top potential of 10,500 times the bet.

Picture yourself stretched out by the pool at a resort. A staff member asks what you’d like to drink, and after scanning the menu you realise your favourite mocktail isn’t available—so you choose something that’s still nice, just not the one you really, really wanted. Beach Invaders has a similar feel. It didn’t come across as a future NetEnt classic, but it’s certainly not a bad game either, and after all the remakes and similar projects the studio has been putting out lately, it did feel relatively fresh.