Cash Wave is a game that Bally dedicated to the idea of spending a relaxing day at the beach. They relied on an existing design for it, this also being a land-based slot machine that you can play in casinos from Las Vegas, among the many others available worldwide. As such, don’t expect anything spectacular graphics wise, but you can check it out and see how it looks next to a regular online release.
Now, for the game area that’s in use, you’re looking at a slot that uses 40 paylines, set up over 5 reels. You can hope at best for rewards of up to 500x the bet, which should mean $200,000 from a single round. For some of its major features, the game delivers things like free spins or stacked wilds, both exciting to trigger.
Betting
The wager system that Cash Wave relies on is going to use 40 active lines at all times. What this means for your bets is that you need to have 40 coins in use, but you are given full liberty over the way their denomination is set up. You can have coins as small as $0.01, or as high as $10. This gets you the option to wager a maximum of $400 per spin, but the starting point is at only $0.40.
Cash Wave Jackpot
The big prize of Cash Wave is going to be worth 500x the stake that you used in that very lucky round. With the $400 bet in place, this can mean a reward of $200,000 at most, which I will admit that it’s a pretty good jackpot to be looking forward to.
What’s less exciting about Cash Wave is the RTP that it uses. It’s relatively low, at 93.85%, which is not that unusual for Bally, but at the same time it’s more in line with the offer of land-based machines, not online ones. I’d generally recommend sticking with slots that have an RTP of 96% or higher, so Cash Wave clearly doesn’t do well here.
Special Features
Several cool features were used in Cash Wave, and they’re the ones that make this slot semi-interesting, things that the RTP and graphics fail at.
Wild Symbols
Represented by the image of a Dollar Bill with the Wild logo, this symbol is your standard substitute that’s going to come in handy whenever you’re trying to form a combo on a line that it is on. It’s not doing anything about the scatters. It’s going to give away some of the best rewards of the slot with its own wins. These wilds are regular sized most of the time, but they gain the ability to appear stacked for the special feature.
Free Spins
Always an exciting feature to get access to, the free spins of Cash Wave will be activated via symbols that have the image of flowers and surfboards. The middle three reels will play host to these scatters, and in a round where all three are visible you will get 5 free spins as a reward. Stacked wild symbols are used for the free spins. You start off the feature with a 5th reel wild in place actually, while the second round gets the 4th and 5th reels wild, and it continues like that. The free spins really can be exciting, thanks to all the wild reels and stacked wilds that appear. Filling up a screen with wilds and getting the ultimate prize of the slot is not out of the question then.
Design
The beach theme is normally a cool one to play on, as that’s something that most people would rather be doing. In this case, I can’t say I’m particularly inclined to give it a go, not with the graphics of a land-based slot that have been ported for online play. It’s a dated design, put simply, so while you get some interesting symbols (girl, flip flops, beach towel, VW van), there are also several Royals that manage to take away quite a bit from its look.
Summary
Cash Wave has exciting features, particularly its free spins, but at the same time it doesn’t give you a decent RTP or modern graphics, so I think it’s safe to say that there will be better alternatives out there, of slots with beach themed graphics.
