Manimals: Slot Overview

If online slots are anything to judge by, tomorrow doesn’t look especially bright. You rarely come across a game that imagines a future where humanity has fixed its biggest issues—on a world without pollution, war, poverty, inequality, or nuclear weapons—where we’ve dropped the flags and biases and come together as one species under god, science, or whatever you subscribe to. Instead, most of the time it’s dystopian chaos, and Stakelogic’s slot Manimals fits right into that mould.

In Manimals’ setting, humans are gone, and genetic engineering has produced animal/human hybrids led by an entity called Tigarius. Players are thrown into a rough struggle through streets and gutters on the way to a final confrontation in a place known only as the arena. Stakelogic’s artists have built a world that’s reminiscent of The Expendables slots, except the cast is made up of engineered monstrosities rather than action icons. The base game leans into a noir, futuristic cyberpunk vibe—very William Gibson—with neon flashes and grime everywhere, where having claws or a set of fangs would be useful just to survive, never mind prosper in this dog-eat-dog landscape.

Along with its oversized characters, Manimals can also deliver a (potentially) oversized playfield. Reels—sure, there are 5 of those—but symbols can compress to create up to 32,768 ways to win. Players who prefer to jump straight to the action get three feature buy options, and stake sizes run from 20 c to $/€100 per spin. The game uses a medium-high volatile math model, with a default theoretical RTP of 96.01%, and there’s no indication that this value changes depending on whether free spins are purchased or not.

Wins are formed left to right starting from the leftmost reel, and Manimals includes ten standard paying symbols. The least exciting are the 10 to A low card ranks, while the 5 premium symbols represent the GM species in the story. Landing 5 matching royals returns 0.4 to 1 times the bet, rising to 1.6-10 times the bet for a 5-of-a-kind high-pay win way. During the base game, wild symbols assist by substituting for any regular paying symbol, and they can appear on every reel except the leftmost one. In free spins, though, wilds are unable to appear on the second reel.

Manimals: Slot Features

Manimals’ add-ons revolve around 3 types of Reel Modifiers, plus a free spins round featuring sticky wilds and a buy feature.

Reel Modifiers

Reel Modifiers can drop in randomly and overwrite reel symbols, although wilds and scatters are excluded from being replaced.

• Stacks – one of the top-tier symbols can overwrite 4 to 8 symbols in the base game or 4 to 16 symbols in free spins. Randomly, an enormous reel symbol can appear in front of the grid during a spin before dropping onto the reels. Expanded symbols may create a Mega Stack by filling an entire reel, or an Epic Stack by filling 2 connected reels.
• Quake – when this reel modifier appears in the game view, every low-value symbol is wiped out. It can happen after a spin and any wins. Once activated, all high-value symbols, scatters, or wilds fall to the bottom of the reel, and a fresh set of symbols drops into the grid matrix.
• Blaster Disaster – available only in the base game. A grenade symbol marks the connecting symbol to be destroyed. Those symbols are removed and replaced with new ones. If a 1×1 symbol is destroyed, it is replaced by a stack of 2 symbols.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols are required to start the free spins round. Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatters grants 8, 10, or 15 free spins, respectively. Extra free spins can also be won while the feature is running. In addition, any increased number of ways generated from a winning outcome becomes persistent. The wilds are persistent as well, dropping to the bottom of the reel and staying there until the round finishes. Keep in mind that wilds show up on reels 3, 4, and 5 in free spins, not on reel 2.

Buy Feature

Players can trigger free spins immediately from the base game by purchasing them. Paying 100x the bet awards 8 free spins, 150x the bet awards 10 free spins, and 200x the bet buys 15 free spins.

Manimals: Slot Verdict

Manimals may not sit alongside the top dogs of the dystopian style—your Nitropolis slots, for instance—but it holds its own well enough. Or at least it brings something engaging to the table. The title is a smart touch, for one. Manimals = man + animals; it’s the kind of obvious wordplay that makes you wonder why it wasn’t taken sooner. Then again, a quick Google reveals an 1980s TV series called Manimal, where the lead character, Jonathan Chase, could shift from human into any animal he wanted, using that ability to fight crime. One funny detail from the show is that even after ripping off his 3 piece suit to transform into something like a snake, panther, or hawk (among other forms), when he changed back, his clothes were always perfectly intact—regardless of his awareness.

Yes, the 80s were a strange era, and Manimals has a few switches it can flip to get pretty strange itself—ranging from three modifiers to a free spins round with sticky wilds. It’s a pity multipliers never make an appearance, but the slot still offers a huge number of win ways for a 5-reel game, particularly with full reel symbols in play. And even though wilds are limited to the rightmost three reels during the bonus, they remain on the grid until the free spins session ends. Altogether, that setup supports wins of up to 5,000x the stake.

Still, given how many ways Manimals can generate, plus all those wild animals—sorry, Manimals—you might expect a higher top-end than 5Kx the bet. Ultimately, it could have been a more unhinged ride if Stakelogic had pushed the genetic experimentation further, but as it is, the gameplay delivers in places and the theme is fairly offbeat, making it worth checking out if twisted future visions are your particular forte.