Top Dawg$, a hip hop-themed slot machine from Relax Gaming, has a familiar feel to it. It would be unfair not to make analogies to Nolimit City’s recent rap phenomenon, East Coast vs. West Coast. While both studios make good use of the subject, the elements you’ll find in Top Dawg$ aren’t directly borrowed from ECvWC, nor are they whole new ideas. Top Dawg$ may seem familiar in its component elements, but Relax has put them together in a way that is still a ton of fun.
Top Dawg$ takes place on the palm tree-lined, potholed streets of South Central Los Angeles. Through a semi-transparent 5-reel, 15-payline game grid, the skyscrapers of downtown can be seen in the distance as jet jets float leisurely across a purple cloud-filled sky. You can almost taste the gin, juice, ganja, and scorching asphalt while you play. The sound ties the whole thing together with a catchy 80s/90s groove that bobs and weaves like a hydraulic lowrider. Even if Top Dawg$ isn’t the racial bomb that East Coast vs. West Coast was, it’s still a lot of fun and will have you doing the Dougie when no one is looking.
Any player, using any device, may win all street with a wager of between 10 pence and forty pounds or euros each spin. The game’s volatility means that it may go from a relaxed foundation to a flurry of action with the help of mysterious respins, but it saves its greatest moments for a sticky wild packed bonus round. The base RTP of 96.10% is more decent than some of those dawg characters seem, and it increases to 96.71% if you purchase the extra.
Across its 15 fixed paylines, this very rule-simple game allows for winning combos of three to five of a type. The lower-paying symbols are J-A royals reminiscent of graffiti art, while the higher-paying symbols are 4 dawgs. The payoff for a winning line of five premiums is between 15 and 30 times the initial wager. In many respects, the Wild symbol is the main attraction, as a payout of 30 times the wager for a full house is possible. They may also act as a substitute for any other pay symbol and shine brightest during the bonus game.
Featured Slot Machines: Top Dog $
Top Dawg$ doesn’t have a ton of features, and whole be honest, those it does have aren’t really novel, but they may be rather useful. There are random surprise respin features sprinkled throughout the main game, and the highest payouts may be made during a free spins bonus round reminiscent of Dead or Alive.
If the final reel falls on a question mark, you will be awarded a mystery respin. If a dead tire sign or a mystery symbol lands on the reels, you get another spin. Once no additional mystery symbols have landed during the respin, the remaining symbols will all reveal the same pay symbol, at which point the win is calculated.
Three, four, or five scattered purple Oldsmobiles trigger 8, 10, or 12 free games, respectively. When wilds appear during the free spins, they become sticky and remain in place for the duration of the bonus. Multipliers for wilds begin at x1 as well. Scatter symbols award an extra free game and raise the win multiplier for all sticky wilds by one, from x1 to x7. If several sticky wilds land on the same winning line, the multiplier for that line increases to a maximum of x16,807.
Free spins may be purchased directly from the main menu, allowing players to skip the waiting time. If you get at least three scatters on the following spin, you’ll have to pay 90 times your entire stake.
The Big Dog$: The Slot Result
Top Dawg$ doesn’t exactly have the same audiovisual impact as the similarly themed East Coast vs. West Coast. Top Dawg$ feels like a manufactured for MTV single that thinks it’s gangsta because it wears a cap backwards, but East Coast vs. West Coast sounds like one of those OG New York rappers, releasing recordings from their cell block based on the life they’ve experienced.
No, we’re just kidding; Top Dawg$ does too much right to be dismissed out of hand. You can’t help but appreciate the theme, even if hip hop isn’t your thing, and it’s much more clear and to the point, which many gamers may prefer. It’s usually a rather serious genre, but as Top Dawg$ demonstrates, it can benefit greatly from a healthy dose of humor. Top Dawg$’ street of broken concrete looks great, and the music is even better, so playing it is a blast.
The gaming aspects are also good, but they aren’t really groundbreaking. Several mysterious re-spins hit within the course of 100 spins. Aside from changing up the pace as you wait for the main action to happen in free spins, they didn’t appear to result in much more than ordinary line winnings. In addition, if the screen is completely covered by the happy bulldog, prizes of up to 450x are available.
You can get a sense of how awesome free spins with sticky wilds can be (and why they’re so popular) by playing games like Dead or Alive 2. When you add in a few multipliers that increase each other in the correct places, you may land ‘Epic Wins’ on every spin, with a maximum win of 25,000 times your wager. When this threshold is reached during a bonus round, play will cease immediately.
It avoids being a stale copy thanks to the Top Dawg$ theme treatment and polished execution. Even if some of their ideas seem like they were inspired by someone else’s success, Relax Gaming is still one of the most creative firms out there. Great music, an engaging atmosphere, and plenty of originality. Overall, Top Dawg$ is a fun game with basic features that may lead to some great times with friends and family.