Play 2016 Gladiators for Free

Before stepping up to the starting line, take a moment to select your sporting bets. You can play from 1 to 21 paylines and alter your bet per payline by clicking on the ‘bet’ button to work your way through the coin values starting at 1 and going up to 100. These options give you a minimum bet per spin of 1 credit and a max bet of 2,100 credits.

Other options for improving your gaming experience include a turbo boost button, which speeds up the spins, while the autoplay button spins the reels automatically until you press stop.

Whenever you hit a matching combination of 3 or more symbols, you are awarded a payout. In order to bank your cash you have to select ‘take win’, however, you can also choose to gamble your winnings for the chance to double your cash – or potentially lose it.

If you want to take the chance you can select ‘take risk’ to play a simple card game. This is a traditional Beat the Dealer game, where you are confronted with one face up card – the dealer’s – and a series of face-down cards. Simply pick a face-down card and if it has a higher value than the dealer’s, you double your money and if its value is lower, you lose your cash from that spin. You will have to decide how lucky you feel!

2016 Gladiators is filled with male sports stars taking part in various sports, from football to basketball. The symbols have the potential to pay some impressive rewards with the football hero paying the most of up to 300,000 credits for 5 matching symbols on an active payline, 50,000 credits for 4 symbols and 10,000 for 3 symbols. The second-highest paying symbol is the basketball and volleyball players, who both pay 100,000 credits for 5 symbols, while the third tier of symbols to watch out for contains the swimmer and the gymnast, who both pay 50,000 credits for 5 symbols.

The icons associated with different sports are the lower paying symbols with the boxing gloves paying 25,000 credits for 5 symbols, the fencing helmet and barbells both paying 12,500 credits and the table tennis bat and the shuttlecock both paying 10,000 credits for 5 matching symbols.

An important symbol to watch for is the colourful laurel wreath, which is the wild symbol. This laurel wreath substitutes for all the other symbols in the game, except the scatter, to create more potential winning combinations. This symbol cropped up quite often during our gaming session and made a good difference to our bankroll.

The flames symbol is the scatter in this game (we assume this is the Olympic flame?) awarding a multitude of free games to the sportiest slots spinners. If you hit 3 scatters you will trigger 10 free spins, 4 scatters triggers 20 free games and 5 scatters awards a huge 50 free spins. This has the potential to make the biggest difference to your play as 50 free games can turn into a lot of gold coins! Unfortunately, we did not activate this round while we were playing as we only ever saw two scatter symbols at any one time. But keep your eyes peeled for the flames as this could make all the difference to your sporting experience.

During the free spins round, all payouts attract a 2x multiplier, plus a laurel wreath is awarded to the most popular athlete each spin. This symbol turns into a wild symbol stays in place for the next spin. This feature is interesting, if a touch complicated, and can award lots of extra wilds on every free spin.

This slot machine has a fun theme which fits in well with the excitement over Olympics 2016 - except for the odd lack of female athletes. The music and sporting sound effects create excitement and a good atmosphere and there are some impressive potential payouts.

However, the low numbers of scatters we saw per spin means the bonus feature must rarely be triggered, unless we were particularly unlucky. The information page describing the bonus feature is also woefully badly written, so you have to jump in and start playing the game to understand how it works for yourself. The wild symbols appear frequently enough to boost the wins but despite some good intentions, this game failed to set our Olympic torch alight.