Steam Squad: Slot Overview

Steampunk’s blend of old-world aesthetics and futuristic invention—high tech filtered through a 19th-century, steam-driven lens—creates striking visuals that plenty of online slot developers like to tap into. Depending on how broadly you define it, games that fit the Steampunk tag could include certain titles in Relax Gaming’s mega Money Train franchise, Coils of Cash from Play’n GO, Yggdrasil Gaming’s Cazino Zeppelin Reloaded, and arguably the most recognisable of the lot, NetEnt’s 2015 hit Steam Tower. Red Tiger feels like a natural studio for this kind of theme, since many of its slots already carry a “science meets mysticism” vibe. Here, that idea takes shape as Steam Squad, where Red Tiger has built a feature set that plays into, around, and alongside its scatter paying wins system.

In the base game, you’re drifting through the clouds aboard a flying machine of questionable reliability, carrying a 6×6 gaming panel. For a Steampunk slot, the setting matters a lot, and Red Tiger has put together a pretty solid world. The home screen opens in a strange underwater environment before the view shifts upward into the cloudscape where the main game unfolds. When free spins are triggered, the action drops back beneath the waves again—what the actual story is, who knows, but some players may enjoy inventing their own steam-powered narrative to connect the scenes.

Even if the theme runs on steam, Steam Squad itself runs on a medium-high volatile math model with a default RTP of 95.64%. Onboard the airborne contraption, players can choose stakes from 10 c to $/€20, and there’s also a feature buy for jumping straight into the bonus. To score a win, you need to land 10 or more matching symbols anywhere on the reels—this both pays and sets off wipeouts and other mechanics explained below.

Steam Squad’s symbol set includes 5 gem icons as the low pays in purple, blue, green, red, and gold, plus a doggie, a scientist type, a lady, and a male character as the high pays—each sporting flying goggles. A 10-11-of-a-kind scatter win returns 0.4 to 3 times the bet, while payouts rise to 5 to 25 times the bet for landing 20 or more matching symbols on the screen. Wilds don’t exist in Steam Squad’s universe.

Steam Squad: Slot Features

The key symbols and mechanics in Steam Squad include winning wipeouts, amplifiers, power up, a booster row, free spins, and a buy feature.

Wipeouts

Whenever a scatter win lands, the matching symbols stay in place, while all other symbols (except free spins scatters) are removed. The winning symbols then drop to the bottom of the reels, and the gaps are filled with a symbol drop. If the win increases, the sequence repeats until no additional winning symbols appear.

Amplifiers

On every spin, random multipliers of x2 to x100 can show above each reel. If a reel becomes filled with winning symbols, its multiplier is awarded and applied to the total win at the end of the spin. When multiple multipliers are awarded, their values are added together.

Power Up

Randomly, after non-winning symbols are destroyed, a winning symbol may power up. If it does, that symbol clones itself to fill the entire reel.

Booster Row

Again at random, a metal frame can appear on one of the rows during a spin. If that framed row becomes filled with winning symbols, a booster is activated. The booster triggers once a winning wipeout ends with no further winning symbols landing. It can turn a non-winning symbol into a winning one to extend the wipeout, or if a multiplier is active, it will increase the multiplier by +1, +2, +3, +4, or +5. After the booster is used, the metal frame moves to a higher row that isn’t filled with winning symbols.

Free Spins

Hitting 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatters in the base game awards 8, 10, 12, or 15 free spins, respectively. During the bonus, landing 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatters grants an extra 3, 5, 7, or 10 free spins, respectively. In free spins, the booster row is always active, and it can shift between spins. Also, whenever a reel is filled with winning symbols, all multipliers shown above reels are increased by +1. These multiplier increases remain in effect until the feature ends.

Buy Feature

Players can purchase the free spins feature for 70x the bet, and this option comes with a higher return value of 96%.

Steam Squad: Slot Verdict

With Steam Squad, is this a studio combining two red-hot ideas—Steampunk and scatter pays—into something genuinely adventurous, or is it simply trying to ride two separate waves at once? The answer depends on taste, because the final package comes with clear highs and lows. Scatter-paying formats have surged in popularity lately, boosted by titles like Pragmatic Play’s Gates of Olympus, Gates of Olympus 1000 and the many games they inspired. At this point, it feels like nearly every developer wants a piece of the action. Red Tiger has experimented with it before—Sugar Monster being one example—and it returns to the idea in Steam Squad, where several mechanics operate in tandem with the scatter-paying core.

And the combination isn’t a bad one. You can almost imagine the Red Tiger team at work, Steampunk goggles pushed up on their heads, gears spinning everywhere, and crackling electricity flashing across the room. Still, the pace can feel a little heavy and slow, and the max win is slightly underwhelming. For a slot featuring so many chunky reel multipliers, a ceiling of 3,235.4x the bet can feel a bit at odds with what the game suggests it might deliver. Maybe the designer was thinking in Victorian-era exchange rates when setting the win potential. If that number doesn’t put you off, there’s enough scatter-paying action and feature interplay in Steam Squad to make it worth checking out.

If Steam Squad were a shaky airship assembled from cogs, gauges, pistons, and whatever else was lying around, you’d still wonder how dependable it would be once it’s up in the clouds. Ultimately, Steam Squad comes across like a machine that could give willing riders an entertaining trip—so long as they’re not too concerned about exactly where it ends up.