Tomb Raider – Secret of the Sword Pokie Machine
The Tomb Raider franchise has become a cultural icon over the last 2 decades, with several video games, a couple of movies and now online pokies from Microgaming. Secret of the Sword is the second in the series and sees posh heroine Lara Croft swinging into action across 5 reels and 30 paylines in a game packed full of exciting bonuses.
Just like the video game, the online pokie aims for non-stop features and it’s become one of the most successful games in Microgaming’s extensive collection.
Raiding The Reels
Sticking to the game design that has helped Lara Croft become such an enduring figure, The Secret of the Sword is set in and around an ancient temple, with crumbling stonework making up an atmospheric backdrop to the game.
The control panel below the reels is used to decide how much to bet per spin, with players having the option to stake just 0.01 each time, although this means only a single line is in play and any wins that land on the other 29 won’t count. So to get all winning combinations credited, the minimum stake is 0.30.
This amount can then be adjusted up by adding more to the value of a coin, and more coins, until the maximum stake of 300.00 per spin is reached.
A payout table details how much each of the symbols is worth and to earn a prize, players will need to line up 3 or more matching ones across an active line, on adjacent reels running left to right. The playing card icons 10, J, Q, K and A pay out the lesser wins, although each has been designed to look vaguely in keeping with the theme.
Images of Ms. Croft will reward players with the bigger prizes, and we see her in a variety of poses, from looking sultry on the roof of a building, to riding a big motorbike, firing guns as she leaps through the air and just hanging around off a cliff.
Tomb Raider Secret of the Sword
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A Tomb Full Of Bonuses
So far then, this pokie is pretty standard, but it’s all about the bonus features here, the most commonly occurring of which is likely to be the wild substitutions. The close-up image of Lara is a wild symbol which pays out when only 2 examples land on a line, and if a full row of 5 appear right across the reels, players win 7500 coins.
It will also act as all except the bonus symbols if it can complete winning lines and some nice animations play out whenever this happens.
A randomly awarded Super Mode sees 5 free spins with extra wild symbols thrown into for good measure. These wilds stay locked in place throughout them, but that’s not the only free spins round, as we also have some triggered by a scatter symbol.
Some sort of silver and green artefact is the scatter and when it lands in any 2 positions players win 2x the total stake, while 3, 4 or 5 of them will equal payouts of 3x, 20x or 100x.
Any 3 or more will also start off 15 free spins during which Microgamings’ popular Rolling Reels feature will be in play. Any symbols that make up a winning line will vanish, leaving empty spaces for new symbols to fall into from above. If this results in another win, the prize is multiplied by 2x and the process repeats itself, with bigger multipliers each time, going up to a maximum of 5x.
This isn’t even the highlight of Tomb Raider however, as that belongs to the Global Adventure bonus triggered by landing the passport symbol in the middle spot of a reel. The game will remember which reel it landed on and once the passport has appeared on all of them, players enter the bonus round.
The aim is to seek out the fragments of a sword across multiple locations, earning rewards along the way until 2 booby traps are triggered to end the round. There’s hidden treasure to unearth however, with players claiming all wins for the current location, multipliers or entry to a Shootout Bonus.
In this part of the game, they will see 15 gold discs and simply need select one to reveal a multiplier prize.
The Verdict
With more action than you can shake an ancient artefact at, Tomb Raider – Secret of the Sword, has unsurprisingly become a big hit for Microgaming and not just with fans of the video game, but with any players looking for varied bonus rounds and features.
There’s not much that can take away from the overall quality of this game, so anyone who likes online pokies should definitely give this one a go.