Remember Gulag

Remember Gulag Overview

NoLimit City has pushed the bounds of accepted taste again and again in the online slot world, coming up with ever more confronting and dicey themes that are designed to shock and entertain. This newest game, especially considering the current global political climate, is perhaps the most controversial and risky theme yet. Remember Gulag is a game which is themed around the forced labour camps set up by Lenin in the Soviet Union. Why, out of all the possible themes in the world, NoLimit City would pick this one is astonishing. That being said, we should give the provider the benefit of the doubt as they may have created this game a long time before the Ukraine crisis began. Even without that happening, though, this is still close to the bone, even for NoLimit City.

As is usually the case with NoLimit City games, plenty of bonus features elevate the gaming experience. The first is called the propaganda feature. This can be enabled at any time. It increases your stake amount by 20% for a better chance of triggering the free spins feature by guaranteeing a scatter on reel 2. An xWays feature is also available in this game, meaning xWays symbols can split symbols to help form more combinations. The game also has the xNudge wild feature, the xSplit wilds feature, and a Gulag Free spins feature, not to mention a NoLimit Bonus feature. All features will be explained in greater detail later on in the review.

Theme and Symbols

Gulag is actually an acronym for Glavnoye Upravleniye Ispravitelno-Trudovykh Lagerey, meaning Chief Administration of Corrective Labour Camps. This was the organisation which coordinated the system of Soviet labour camps and prisons from the 1920s to the mid-1950s. The camps and prisons were used to detain political prisoners and criminals (or whoever the Soviet Union determined as criminals). At its height, the Gulag imprisoned millions of people, making many of the prisoners work in mines. The camps are remembered for their merciless degradation and exploitation. This game gives a very strong representation of these camps.

The background in the base game is a black and white screen with rippling curtains on either side of the playing board. However, when the game goes into the free spins, the background changes to an image representing a camp somewhere in Siberia where the driving snow and iron walls covered in barbed wire give a powerful and horrific visual to this very niche game.
The playing board is an unusual tapering construction enclosed entirely by cold, sharp barbed wire.

The symbols for this game are split into low-paying, high-paying and special symbols. The low-paying symbols are the 10, J, Q, K, and A in Russian characters. The A is the most valuable of these, worth 3x the stake for the top combination. On the other hand, the more valuable symbols are the saluting bear, Semyonov, Berla, Zhukov and Joseph Stalin. Stalin is the most valuable symbol, worth 5x the stake for the top combination. The special symbols finally are the standard wild, the xWays symbol, the xSplit symbol and the free spins scatter.

Game Play

Remember Gulag is played on a 6-reel game that begins with 144 pay lines in the formation of 3x3x4x4x5x5. To start with, reels 5 and 6 are covered in barbed wire because they are locked. These reels are unlocked by landing scatters. The pay lines can then increase all the way to 614,656 thanks to the xSplit mechanic. To score wins, players must land three or more matching symbols in winning combinations from left to right on the reels.

The betting range for Remember Gulag is 20p to £120 per spin. To adjust their bet levels, players can toggle their stake up and down using the tool located at the bottom left-hand side of the screen.

Further information, including a short tutorial and a display of the paytable, can be found via the menu button in the right-hand corner of the screen. The spin and auto spin buttons are located in the centre of the screen.
Volatility for this slot is rated in the very high range. The return to player percentage for Remember Gulag is 96.08%, which is just above average. The biggest payout that players can win on one spin is 30,000x your stake.

Features

The first feature to discuss is the Propaganda Bet feature. When turned on, it will boost your stake by 20% until you turn it off. This boost is rewarded with a better chance of triggering the free spins game, as reel two is always guaranteed to land a scatter. This also unlocks reel five giving you more pay lines to play on.

The second feature is the xWays feature common in all NoLimit City games. This feature concerns the xWays symbol. This symbol can appear as a single or in x2 or x3 formats. When it appears, the xWays feature will begin.
When this happens, it will then reveal a regular random symbol. If more than one of these xWays symbols appears, all of them will reveal the same symbol. The xSplit symbol can then split these symbols, and when they are, the multiplier value is doubled.
The xNudge wild feature is next. These symbols can land on reels three or four in the base game and in the free spins game. They provide a stacked wild that always nudges to become a full reel wild. Every nudge that is granted boosts the attached multiplier by 1x. When an xSplit Wild splits an xNudge Wild, it adds one more wild to that reel.

Next on the feature list is the xSplit wild feature. These symbols split xWays symbols to create more symbols and more pay lines. This can lead to the pay lines increasing to their maximum of 614,656. Splitting a symbol more than once brings a multiplier into play, which then doubles every time the symbol is split again. After landing, xSplit Wilds convert into 2 regular wilds, which can then be split by other xSplit Wilds.

The Gulag free spin game, however, is the best feature in this game. It is triggered when players land three or more of the scatter on the reel at the same time. The more scatters used to trigger the free spins game, the better the conditions of the bonus round. These are explained below:
3 Scatters (Standard Mode): 1 character is randomly chosen and active.
4 Scatters (All Aboard Mode): All 4 characters are active.
5 Scatters (Double Vodka Mode): All 4 characters active + multipliers doubled.
Landing additional scatters within this game will add more spins to your total.
Finally, this game also has a bonus buy feature. However, it is not available in the UK.

Conclusion

Forgetting for a minute the powerfully challenging theme, this is a fun game with a lot going on. Thematically harrowing with loads of features and decent win potential, this has all the hallmarks of a classic NoLimit City game. The big letdown in terms of its mechanics is its incredibly high volatility which makes things difficult to predict, even for an online slot game. The many pay lines that materialise, however do give players a fighting chance at scoring a few good wins.