Fire Strike — RTP, volatility and max win

Diamonds, playing cards, chips and a money box burn on a red background in Fire Strike, a classic-style fire slot from Pragmatic Play. Alongside the paylines it uses a mechanic in the mould of the nine-masks games, where certain symbols pay wherever they land.

Fire Strike came out on October 10, 2019 and borrows the look of old fruit and casino machines, with burning symbols in place of cherries. Its 5×3 field holds 10 paylines, compact enough that every hit is easy to spot. You can bet €0.10 at the low end and €50 at the upper end. Combined with a very large max win, that bet range gives Fire Strike a far wider win range than its simple look suggests.

The base game pays on fixed lines: identical symbols must line up reel after reel on a line; the slot offers 10 paylines in total. The wild is there to close those lines. Alongside them runs the nine-masks count, where the special symbols are not tied to a line and pay according to how many of them appear anywhere on the grid. A single spin can therefore pay line wins and a special-symbol win at the same time.

Wild: the wild fills in missing symbols on a line and does most of the work for line wins in the base game.

Nine-masks mechanic: the special symbols pay by count across the grid, whatever reel or row they land on. The more of them show up together, the bigger the payout. This count is what drives the high max win, because it runs in parallel to the lines and can far outstrip them.

RTP 95.5%, lower than 64% of the 400 Inferno slots. Background: how RTP works on a slot. Volatility Medium-high, like 28 of the 182 slots in the Fire & flame theme. Background: what slot volatility means. Max win 27,000× (€1,350,000 at the highest stake). Background: what max win means on a slot.

At 95.5%, the return of Fire Strike falls a little short of the Inferno midpoint, though not by far.

Its 27,000× ceiling, on the other hand, is among the highest in the collection, which stands out for a game with only a five-by-three reel set. Medium-high volatility fits that mix: line wins stay small, and the big amounts come from the nine-masks count.

Since casinos choose the return for Fire Strike out of a band Pragmatic Play defines, it helps to compare it with the inferno slots ranked by RTP, where every game is listed with its highest value.

The sequel to Fire Strike also comes from Pragmatic Play and keeps the same name with a numbered suffix. Both games share the same RTP, but the sequel has medium rather than medium-high volatility and a slightly lower max win. If you want the sharper swings of the original, stay with the first game; if you prefer a calmer ride, try the sequel.

As Fire Strike has a sequel with a different volatility and max win, the overview of versions of Fire Strike puts both games side by side.

Beside Fire Strike: more slots with medium-high volatility, flames on the reels as well as near-identical RTP values.