SlotMill are a small Swedish outfit based in the capital city of Stockholm.
They only hit the industry in 2019, but the team behind the company has experience stretching back much further than that.
Like so many other new software developers in the casino gaming industry, SlotMill came to be when a few industry vets at bigger companies came together and decided to branch out on their own.
The result is great games where technical expertise meets attention to detail, on and off the screen.
Maths models and technical processes have been fine tuned to create unrivalled levels of performance, while gameplay is high quality with AAA visuals, and entertaining from the first spin to the last.
SlotMill are becoming more common in UK casinos now thanks to their distribution deals with the likes of Relax Gaming, Soft Gamings and Softswiss, with a number of household name brands like Coral now offering their games to the British market.
What are SlotMill Games Like?
Visually, SlotMill clearly know what they are doing.
All of their games come in HD, and although they like to create fun style artwork for a lot of their slots – just look at Drunken Sailors to see what I mean – when it comes to the more serious themes, they are more than capable of switching styles.
A few, such as The Big Hit could even be described as having one foot in the adult comic style.
In all of their games though, you can expect animated backdrops that feel alive and support the artwork on the reels, along with excellent music and soundscapes to create atmosphere.
This is all very detailed stuff, so the more you look and listen, you more you notice.
They are quite varied in their themes, but any players who enjoy Candy Crush style games will find a lot to like at SlotMill, with Sweet Spotz and Gem Rush being among the more cutesy titles in their roster.
This area is definitely a strength of theirs.
One thing that sticks out about SlotMill, is that they seem particularly averse to the standard 5×3 grid. There are one or two older titles with this set up, but for the most part they are much more interesting than that which in turn allows for a wider range of in game features.
Being a newer company, SlotMill only have a smallish portfolio of games, but among these are a great range of themes and gameplay styles that perfectly showcase what the company is capable of.
Volatility, RTP and Features
They tend to lean towards the higher end of the volatility scale, coming in around the 96% mark in terms of RTP, although some do fall slightly short of that mark.
In terms of features, they don’t go overboard so their games aren’t confusing to follow, but there is certainly enough feature variety from game to game to hold your interest.
Although not available in the UK, one of their most popular features with players in other regions is the ability to buy bonus rounds using their Fast Track feature.
You probably know what this is already, but for the uninitiated, it allows players to pay for a bonus round on the next spin. The cost of this is obviously high as the potential payout can be significant, but equally, it can be a lot less than the cost of the round.
It’s about whether you want to grind for the bonus or dive straight in.
Their other big feature that UK players cannot use, is the Burst Mode.
This is like making multiple spins each second, so it’s a sort of high speed version of the game. It stops if you hit a bonus round, but otherwise, it’s not particularly entertaining as the mechanics work too fast for the game to display the visuals, so you just get a sort of holding screen that updates with how many spins the machine has calculated and any winnings you get.
Essentially, the game is working exactly as normal in the background, but by taking the visual representation away, it can get through the spins so much faster.
Despite these two features not being allowed in the UK, things like falling reels, win re-spins, interesting wild features, bonus rounds, multipliers and the like are all included in SlotMill’s games, so there’s plenty to get your teeth into.
Lightweight Game Design
Not necessarily something the end user (us players) would think about too much, but the more complex a game is and the higher quality the graphics and animations are, the more data it takes to load and run them.
Many top quality games can demand as much as 40-50 MB to run, but the team at SlotMill have managed to get that right down to between 6MB and 8MB.
You might be thinking they have had to make compromises in order to do this, but their games are no less feature rich and all come with HD visuals.
So how do they do it?
For obvious reason they aren’t going to share the finer details of their secret sauce, but it comes down to the revolutionary processes and technology the team have developed.
The benefit for players is that load times are kept to an absolute minimum, and the demands on the device you are using are reduced too. Very useful if your internet connection is slow.
For operators, it means more games can be included in each IOS bundle, so their games list can be bigger and more interesting, which in theory should attract more players.