Cash Defense: Slot Overview

One of the nicer perks of the web used to be jumping onto an aggregator site like bored.com and playing a quick game for free. Bored.com may be gone, but a classic time-killer then and now is Bloons TD. In that game, streams of balloons wind along a track while you place towers and other defenses to pop as many as you can. It begins fairly gentle, yet the balloons steadily become quicker, tougher, and harder to burst. If that tower-defense style is your thing, there’s a slot with a similar vibe worth a look too – Cash Defense from software designer Print Studios.

In Cash Defense, you’re not bursting ‘bloons’ – you’re protecting the realm from an alien bug outbreak. The setting is a rolling, hilly landscape dotted with towers packed with weapons, ready to fire at anything nasty that gets too close. Atmosphere-wise, Cash Defense arguably sits near Holy Hand Grenade thanks to its medieval nods, though there are slight hints of Royal Potato and even Pine of Plinko in places. The sweeping score has a marching-into-battle tone, getting eager players ready to pop balloons – or bugs – depending on the mission.

Cash Defense gives you a few different routes for getting down to the bug-bashing. The standard way is to wager 10 p/c to $/€20 per paid round and spin away. Alternatively, there are three feature bet options. Rated Medium-high volatile in normal play, Cash Defense runs at an RTP of 96.29%, while the Feature Bet comes with three separate values depending on which option you pick. Gameplay takes place on a 5-reel, 4-row setup, using 26 paylines to form winning combinations of 3 to 5 OAK.

Paylines award from left to right, starting at the far-left side of the grid. Print Studios has also given names to all 10 bug pay symbols which, from low to high, are Dropax, Hornax, Bublax, Rhinax, Steve, Alan, Mantisa, Scythra, Psykrona, and Mentarch. Credit where it’s due – they’re a quirky bunch, and payouts range from 1.5 to 50 times the bet for a 5-symbol line win.

Cash Defense: Slot Features

Cash Defense doesn’t use standard wild symbols, but it makes up for that with a collection of distinctive mechanics, such as SuperSpinners and multiple Tower Defense features. Here’s what they do…

SuperSpinners

SuperSpinners randomly appear in the gaps between reel symbols with multiplier values assigned to them. When a winning payline runs through active SuperSpinners, the win is multiplied by the relevant values.

Tower Defense Features

There are 2 TD Features in Cash Defense players can trigger – the Mini TD feature and the Grand TD feature. In both, towers are deployed to take out enemies travelling along a path. Arrow towers work well for picking off single enemies, while Cannon towers are better suited to clearing groups. Eliminated enemies award special features.

Mini TD Feature

Hitting the Mini TD symbol on the rightmost reel activates the Mini TD feature, which is played in two parts:

• Part 1 – In the opening phase, 2 random towers fire at 1 wave of 10 enemies plus a Bonus enemy. Taking out the Bonus enemy triggers the Grand TD Bonus.
• Part 2 – You receive 1 spin featuring a Jumbo symbol covering reels 2 and 3, substituting for all eliminated symbol enemies. Those eliminated enemies are shown on the Jumbo symbol.

Grand TD Bonus

This feature is either won from the Mini TD feature or triggered in the base game when 3 or more scatters symbols land on the screen. Landing 4 or 5 scatters also pays 20x or 100x the bet, respectively. The Grand TD Bonus is also played in 2 parts.

• Part 1 – You pick a tower setup, then a wave of 10 enemies moves through while the towers try to eliminate them. If at least 5 are eliminated, a second wave of 50 SuperSpinner enemies begins.
• Part 2 – 3 spins are granted with a Jumbo symbol covering reels 2, 3, and 4. The Jumbo symbol substitutes for all symbol enemies eliminated in Part 1. In addition, for every SuperSpinner enemy eliminated in Part 1, a randomly chosen SuperSpinners’ multiplier is increased by 1 before each spin.

Feature Bet

The Feature Bet gives players access to three additional ways to play Cash Defense. They are:

• Scatter Boost – 1.5x the bet to increase the chances of landing scatters, RTP 96.64%.
• Mini TD feature for 28.9x the bet, RTP 96.83%.
• Grand TF feature for 94x the bet, RTP 97.33%.

Cash Defense: Slot Verdict

If I’m remembering Bloons TD correctly, you could build a huge golden statue that unleashed a devastating barrage, wiping out swarms of balloons – even those big zeppelin-style ones that soak up a ton of hits. If you were lucky enough to have a workplace that tolerated a bit of tower defending on the clock, even better, because the game had serious replay value. Cash Defense offers a similarly decent level of replayability. SuperSpinners, a familiar Print Studios hallmark, help keep the base game ticking over, which is useful since landing bonus rounds naturally didn’t feel especially easy. That said, Scatter Boost can help move things along, and the two other direct feature buys are available too, each with strong RTP figures as a bonus.

When they do trigger, the Tower Defense rounds are where Cash Defense really shows off its creativity. You’re essentially watching and hoping the towers manage to drop as many enemies as possible. Of course, the further you progress, the more engaging the second phase becomes – because the more enemies that end up on the Jumbo Symbol, the better those spins should be in theory. Outcomes varied from brutal bonus rounds where nothing got eliminated (meaning nothing appeared on the Jumbo symbol) to runs where the second wave arrived and defeated SuperSpinner enemies boosted multipliers on each Part 2 spin. It’s pretty entertaining and can be fairly punchy as well, with wins up to a maximum of 20,000x the bet on the table. Still, don’t underestimate it – taking out more than 3 enemies can be seriously difficult.

As you’d expect, something this different won’t suit every type of gambler. For some it may feel too gimmicky, or simply too far removed from what they think a slot “should” be. Players who haven’t tried a traditional tower defense game may not click with Cash Defense’s approach either. Even those who know the formula might have liked a progression element, such as being able to ‘buy’ extra towers to help in later bonus rounds. Just a thought, because whichever way you look at it, Cash Defense is a distinctive Print Studios creation, and it deserves credit for that. It may not be as wild as something like Reapers, but Cash Defense is another release that nudges the boundaries of what an online slot can be.