Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine (Rabcat): Overview

Over the last few years, interest in Tesla has surged again, yet the unfortunate reality is that his work stayed in the shadows for decades after his death. With much of the credit and celebrity going to Thomas Edison, the Croatian born inventor passed away broke and famously absorbed by his pigeons. Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine is an absorbing alternate-history video slot that imagines what might have happened if Tesla’s high-energy, eccentric, and sometimes downright manic concepts had actually become reality.

After operating exclusively under Microgaming for some time, independent studio Rabcat has chosen to broaden its output by partnering with Yggdrasil Gaming and launching this title through the YGS Masters series—an initiative that helps smaller developers reach a larger audience by using the Yggdrasil platform. Inspired by the man renowned for shaping the modern electricity supply system, this 5-reel, 25-payline slot titled Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine packs in features such as exploding wilds, cloned reels, and a free spins round where you can level-up to boost your prospects. You can step into Tesla’s strange universe on desktop or mobile and wager from 0.25 to €/$75 per spin.

While spinning, it’s hard not to wonder what Nikola Tesla—an enthusiastic gambler in his own right—would make of it all. The action unfolds in what appears to be Tesla’s Wardenclyffe lab (later torn down after he couldn’t keep up with the mortgage), and Tesla himself occasionally appears in the background, jotting notes and examining his huge, hissing, sparkling machine. From a presentation standpoint, the slot is a standout, built with cutting-edge visuals, excellent sound design, and plenty of animated components that give it a liveliness you don’t always see in this industry. It’s bursting with character, and its dark, slightly ominous atmosphere adds another shot of tension and excitement.

Alongside the Art Deco-styled A, K, Q and J royals, the reels also feature various gadgets that reinforce the Tesla theme, including capacitors, futuristic goggles, and stopwatches. Among the regular symbols, the stopwatch pays the most, awarding 40 times your stake for five of a kind. A wild symbol also appears, shown as Tesla wearing his futuristic night-vision goggles—and it matches the value of the top standard symbol.

Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine (Rabcat): Features

Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine includes three base-game add-ons that collectively make up the Energy Burst feature. It triggers when a standard symbol lands fully stacked on the middle reel. Lower-value stacks grant 3 bonus spins, while a stack of premium symbols awards 5 bonus spins. After it activates, you’ll then receive one of the following at random:

• Wild Substitution – one of the standard symbols will act as a wild during the bonus spins.
• Reel Clone – the game will randomly pick three reels that will link to display matching symbol arrangement for all bonus spins.
• Exploding Wild – between two and three symbols are chosen randomly and transformed to locked wilds that remain in place throughout the feature.

Although the base game can produce wins up to 1000 times your stake (when you hit a full screen of wilds/stopwatches), the biggest prizes are more likely to come from the Free Spins feature. This starts when three or more scatter symbols land anywhere on the screen—3, 4 or 5 scatters award 8, 10 or 12 free spins respectively. Once triggered, you’ll play on a reel set that pays both ways, plus a locked wild placed in the central position of the middle reel. You begin at level 1, and whenever a Level-Up symbol appears on any reel, you advance one level (up to a maximum of 5). Each time you level up, an additional locked wild is randomly placed on reels 2 – 4 directly next to the original locked wild.

Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine (Rabcat): Verdict

Judging by this first joint project with Yggdrasil Gaming, Rabcat’s decision to collaborate with the Swedish studio clearly paid off. We already know Rabcat can create visually striking titles (see Forsaken Kingdom, for instance), but Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine is the first—at least in our view—to deliver a well-rounded experience across the board, including the gameplay itself. Even if the individual components aren’t especially original, Rabcat combines them in a distinctive way that feels like a hybrid of video game and slot machine, wrapped in a compelling noir mood.

With medium variance, the 4100x potential on offer isn’t mind-blowing, but it should still provide solid value for players who want some decent session time while retaining the ability to land sizeable wins. Nikola Tesla’s Incredible Machine probably won’t win over every cork-sniffing hard-core gambler, yet it’s very likely to resonate with the wider audience.