The persistent and extreme dread of deep bodies of water such as the sea is known as thalassophobia, which may be found in the medical vocabulary as a whole. I’m letting my imagination go wild here, but after playing Jaguar Strike, I can’t help but think that someone over at Stakelogic is a huge fan of Push Gaming’s smash game Razor Shark but secretly gets ‘the dread’ whenever I try to play it. That might be one motivation for the development of Jaguar Strike, an Aztec-themed slot game that borrows heavily from Razor Shark but adds its own twist with a coin bonus and a new set of features.
The initial weirdness has worn off, replaced with an odd curiosity about what they will do next after playtesting multiple slots from Stakelogic that are obvious clones of other companies’ work. Jaguar Strike is a 5×4 video slot with 20 fixed bet ways to win for the time being. The similarities to Razor Shark might not jump out at you at first because of the jungle backdrop with its carved stones, stalking jaguars, ruins, and greenery if you don’t read the rules. It looks nice, but once you press spin, the game’s familiarity dampens your enthusiasm.
Jaguar Strike may be played on any device and features two distinct wagering options. Standard wagers might be anything from 20 pence to £/€20 each spin. If you want to increase your chances of getting additional scatter symbols, you may activate Super Strike, which doubles your wager. Both modes share the same high volatility and the same default RTP of 95.63 percent.
The paytable features eight standard symbols: four J-A royals and four premium characters. When a winning combination of five symbols appears anywhere on the reels, the payout can be anything from 5 times the wager to 50 times the wager for the four high payouts. Jaguar Strike does not make use of wild symbols, but there are other symbols that are connected to the game’s bonus features.
Jaguar Assault: Slot Functions
When Mystery Symbol stacks appear in Jaguar Strike, respins are awarded and free games continue until there are no more Mystery Symbols left on the reels.
When four identical Mystery Symbols appear on a single reel, the Drop and Reveal Respins bonus round is activated. The Mystery Symbols shift down a position with each respin, eventually revealing either a winning combination or a Jaguar Strike Symbol. The Jaguar Strike Coin feature is activated if any of the Mystery Symbols transform into Jaguar Strike Symbols.
Each qualifying position spins to show either scatter symbols or unique coin symbols offering bet multipliers of 1x-10x, 25x-200x, or 250x-1,000x for bronze, silver, or gold coins, respectively, as part of the Jaguar Strike Coin feature.
If you get three or more scatter symbols, you’ll trigger the free spins bonus. The Drop and Reveal Feature begins once Mystery Symbols have been placed on Reels 2 and 4. Win multipliers grow by 1x with each free spin, and more Mystery Symbols can appear anywhere on the grid throughout the bonus round. No specific amount of bonus turns will be awarded. Instead, as long as any Mystery Symbols remain in view, the feature will keep spinning. All Mystery Symbols advance one position if the Jaguar Strike Coin feature is triggered, revealing a scatter symbol.
The Slot Verdict: A Jaguar Attack
Stakelogic has done it again with their next puzzle game, Jaguar Strike. They’ve already copied CherryPop from Avatar UX and Valley of the Gods from Yggdrasil, and now they’ve taken the idea for Razor Shark from Push Gaming. The action has been relocated from the original game’s bubbling underwater setting to the midst of a Central American jungle, but this isn’t enough of a change to mask the game’s essential elements, which are identical to those in Push Gaming’s original.
The issue of why Stakelogic is acting in this way naturally arises. They’re not some idea-starved studio, because they have a crew that has shown themselves capable of originality. What about that? It’s become so bad that it might be considered malicious, as if another studio’s employees had wronged them in some manner and now they want retribution. This is just conjecture on my part, of course, but that’s the sense I’m getting from them. Talk about alienating and burning bridges. Will Push Gaming take a position as Avatar UX did over the CherryPop fiasco, or will they let this one slide?
The combination of free spins, a progressive win multiplier, and Mystery Stacks or Coins remains a winning one in the gaming world. It takes some serious slots magic to score a seemingly endless line of Mystery Stacks with a slowly growing win multiplier while also scoring Jaguar Coins. Regrettably, this has already been explored previously. It’s one thing to impress people with a novel concept; it seems like this was made only to line the creator’s pockets.
When things are going well in the game, it’s easy to forget that you’re just playing a shoddy knockoff of an existing system. Not only that, but a someone who has never played Razor Shark would never know what it is. But would savvy gamblers avoid Jaguar Strike out of loyalty or ethical concerns, or is this a tempest in a teapot given that many view the business as replete with knockoffs to begin with? Whatever the case may be, the current state of copy & paste at Stakelogic is unsettling.
Leave a Reply