Rise of Ymir Slot Review

We love Hacksaw Gaming, and if you are a hardcore slot gambler, we are sure that you fancy some of their products. We recently read that this top provider debuted in Switzerland via a partnership with Grand Casino Baden and Gamanza Group AG and also joined forces with Uplatform. So, aside from making quality games, Hacksaw’s team is keeping busy on other fronts, expanding wherever they can.

As far as reel-spinning titles go, Hacksaw can be a bit all over the place, as this is a company that does not have a super steady release schedule. Sometimes, they debut one new title in a month, and others, they will unleash three to four. In October 2024, Rise of Ymir was the sole Hacksaw Gaming slot to appear online, but in September, they had like five hit the Web. Rise of Ymir showed up in gaming sites’ lobbies on October 14th, 2024, first at exclusive platforms, and ten days later, it got global distribution. Several weeks after its initial availability, this slot is doing Okay in most high-profile markets. It’s not charting anywhere in the top one hundred rankings. Still, it’s doing decently in nations like Canada, Finland, Ireland, Norway, the UK, Argentina, India, and others, swimming in the top two hundred territories in these regions.

Theme & Design

Before setting down to review this game, we had no idea who Ymir was. We are sure some of you found yourself in the same situation. We assumed that he was some sort of figure from Norse mythology, given the visuals of this gaming product, and we turned out to be correct. Apparently, Ymir is a primordial giant, one born from the melting ice in Ginnungagap, from whom the Norse gods created worlds. Ve, Vili, and Odin, all notable gods that we believe some of you know, killed Ymir, and his flesh became our earth, his bones the mountains, his skull the sky, and his blood the seas. At least, that is what we read while getting informed about the theme of this spinner.

As you likely know, Norse slots are trendy in the online gambling realm. But are there any other Ymir-inspired ones? We only found one more bearing his name, Warth of Ymir from Nemesis Games Studio, which came out in December 2021. He may have gotten featured as a symbol in some other games, but that would require more in-depth research on our end, which we are not willing to do for a slot review right now.

Hacksaw Gaming has kind of made a name for itself through their upbeat cartoony presentations. This one is a bit different. It has more dramatic illustrations and music, and its base game background reminded us of an early to mid-2000s PC strategy game, like the main menu of something like Rome Total War.

The soundtrack here is Norse-style, paired with some old-school arcade sound effects. The base set is a Norse landscape covered in snow, with Norse warriors occupying it and Ymir standing tall over a mountain holding a rock. You get different settings in the bonus round, in the same vein, boasting different color combos. The animations here are pretty basic, and the button configuration is the typical Hacksaw one, which is the setup this company usually uses.

Specs & Gameplay

Rise of Ymir is a 5×4 slot with fourteen paylines and a max win of x15,000 on a top wager of $100. The lowest one you can make here is $0.10 per spin, and the hit frequency of this title stands at 25.24. It comes in four RTP versions, with the variant with the lowest return-to-player setting listing payout odds of 88.23% and the highest one of 96.31%, which you will most commonly see with this high-variance release.

You collect prize sin Rise of Ymir by lining up three to five matching symbols on a payline, with then 10 to A royals paying x1 for five-of-a-kind combos, and the six image premiums producing wins from x3 to x10 when five identical tokens from this category stop in view.  

Bonus Features

You have a wealth of bonus features in Rise of Ymir. We open up this part of our review by telling you about the Ymir symbol essential to the Ymir’s Conquest mode. These blue Ymir tokens act as wild multipliers with values up to x100. When Ymirs are a part of a win, the payout gets multiplied by their displayed value, and after a payout, a free respin gets awarded to any Ymir on a respin, continuing this process until there are no new ones. Landing four on the same reel merges them into a Giant Ymir, combining all their multipliers. We also have a Mega Multiplier that lands alongside Ymirs, adding all the Ymir multipliers into a global one. This feature also triggers a respin.

Hitting three scatters gets you ten Dawn of Gods free spins, where you have the Ymir’s Conquest and Mega Multiplier features active, and getting two or three scatters inside this round awards an additional two or four on-the-house gaming rounds, respectively.

Four scatters get you the Fury of War spins, another bonus that also includes the Ymir’s Conquest and Mega Multiplier features, with the same method of earning extra spins as in the round described above.

For most, the main attraction of this Hacksaw game is the Fall of Ymir mode, which triggers with five scatters, including dead tokens, Volcanic Ymir symbols, Mega multipliers, and Asgardian Orbs. You begin this round with three lives, consuming one per spin. Each non-dead symbol refills your life meter to three, with this bonus concluding when you have no more refills. Volcanic Ymirs stick and can have values up to x100. Orbs interact with the global multiplier and add value to some Volcanic Ymirs. How they do this depends on their color. At the end of this bonus, the combined value of all the Volcanic Ymirs gets awarded. You can buy this feature for a price of x300, and the Fury of Ymir and Dawn of Gods modes will cost you x200 and x100, respectively.

GOSU Verdict

Undoubtedly, Rise of Ymir does a good job of setting a moody atmosphere, and it has pleasing visuals, decent specs, and loads of features. We will give this game a positive review, noting that it was not as good as we had hoped but that it is still far better than 90% of the novel reel-spinning fare you will come across. We appreciated the diversity on hand here and liked the changing settings, but we wished that the presentation in Rise of Ymir could have been a tad more dynamic. Still, we recommend this slot and suggest you give it a go.

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