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A vampire divorce with no wilds in sight
Pragmatic Play has built a Megaways slot around the bitter divorce settlement of two immortals, and in a remarkably ruthless move, they left the wild symbol out of it completely. Forever Split Megaways features six vertical reels with two extra horizontal strips above and below the middle four, tumbling wins, and up to 72,030 ways to win. The RTP sits at a respectable 96.58%, the volatility is medium, and the ceiling is 10,000x your bet. But everything worth playing for is locked up on those two extra strips.
The extra rows and the Settlement Multiplier
The grid takes the familiar Megaways format and injects a distinct oddity. Six reels spin downward, with the first holding up to five symbols and the last up to six. Then, hovering above and below reels two to five, are two horizontal strips of four positions each. These spin independently from right to left. To actually hit the 72,030 ways the studio advertises, you need every single position on every reel filled at once.
Underneath all this, wins work the usual way: matching symbols on neighboring reels from left to right, starting from the first reel. On a board this crowded, that left-to-right requirement bites hard, often cutting off promising combinations before they can start.
The real reason those horizontal strips exist is the Settlement Multiplier. Any paying symbol landing on the top or bottom strip can carry a multiplier of x1, x2, x3, x5, x8, x10, or x15. When that symbol is part of a winning combination, its value gets added to a running total, which then multiplies every subsequent win until the tumbles from that spin run out. If you land several multiplier symbols, their values add together rather than compounding. In the base game, this total resets the moment the spin finishes. In the free spins round, it doesn’t, and that one difference defines the entire game.
Free spins and the cost of litigation
Landing three scatters anywhere awards ten free spins, with five more for each additional scatter past the third, meaning a six-scatter board opens up twenty-five spins. During this round, special reels come into play. Every paying symbol that lands on the two horizontal strips is guaranteed to carry a multiplier, rather than just having a chance to. More importantly, the Settlement Multiplier stops resetting. For the duration of the round, it only climbs.
This persistent multiplier is the version of the game everyone actually wants to play. However, free spins land naturally about once in every 343 spins. That long wait is exactly why the buy menu is where most players will end up.
You have two buy options: ten free spins for 100x your stake, or Super Free Spins for 500x, where the strip symbols carry a minimum multiplier of x2 instead of x1. Curiously, neither option costs you much in return percentage. The 100x round runs at 96.54% and the 500x at 96.49%, just a hair under the 96.58% base game RTP. You are genuinely paying for access, not accepting a worse mathematical deal. Alternatively, you can use the ante bets: 1.5x your stake for double the trigger odds, or 3x for five times the odds, both of which shave off a very slight margin of the RTP.
We bought the standard round for $200 at a $2.00 bet to see how it played out. Three scatters landed, our ten spins opened, and the multiplier climbed to x3 by the third spin. Then, it just stopped. With four spins left, a tantalizing x5 sat on the top strip, but without a connection, it was useless. The multiplier counter remained at x3 right through to the final spin.
The round paid a dismal $4.80. That is just 2.4x the bet out of a feature that cost 100x, perfectly illustrating what a medium-volatility bonus looks like when the symbols simply refuse to connect. The dead spins play out in a rigid sequence, offering no relief or top-ups, until the final summary screen confirms the damage.
Symbols, art, and the missing wild
The complete absence of a wild symbol is a jarring omission for a modern Megaways release. The multiplier strips are the studio’s answer to this, designed to pay you more for the wins you already made instead of helping you make them. Consequently, the board feels noticeably stiffer than most Megaways slots. A near miss here stays a near miss.
The paytable reflects this heavy reliance on the multipliers. The gold-lit man is the top symbol, paying just 10x your bet for six of a kind. Below him, the woman pays 5x, the diamond necklace 2.5x, and the four royals sit between 0.4x and 0.75x. On a game boasting a 10,000x ceiling, those are remarkably small base numbers, making it plainly obvious that the big math is entirely locked behind the bonus features.
But the art and atmosphere are fantastic reasons to load up the game. Two vampires who have clearly loathed each other for centuries sit at a black marble table under a blood-red moon, she in a sharp red dress with her lawyer, he nursing a glass of something dark. The symbols represent the estate being bitterly divided: his watch with a bat on the dial, her necklace, a green settlement scroll, and framed photographs of the former couple. The scatter is brilliantly designed as one of those photographs torn straight down the middle. The joke runs through every feature name, with the bonus opening on a “BEGIN THE IMMORTAL PROCEEDINGS” card and closing on “TOTAL SETTLEMENT”. Pragmatic Play rarely commits to a theme with this much narrative flair.
Pros & Cons
Good
- The theme is highly original and perfectly executed across every screen, right down to the legal phrasing on the bonus cards.
- Buying the bonus barely penalizes your return: 96.54% on the 100x round compared to 96.58% in the base game.
- Base wins land roughly one spin in five, keeping the reels somewhat active while you wait out the long gaps between scatters.
- The persistent multiplier gives the free spins a great sense of progression, with a total that can only increase.
Bad
- The absolute lack of wild symbols makes the board feel incredibly rigid.
- Multiplier symbols land on the strips constantly but rarely join wins, making the headline mechanic feel almost invisible in the base game.
- A trigger rate of one in 343 spins is a punishing wait for anyone not using the buy features.
- Strip away the brilliant divorce theme, and the core mechanics, tumbles plus a collected win multiplier, are very familiar Megaways territory.
Verdict
Our $200 buy returned $4.80, and the Settlement Multiplier the entire game is built around stalled at x3 after just three spins. While one rough round doesn’t settle the math, it perfectly demonstrates the shape of the gameplay: you are paid for linking multiplier symbols on two thin strips into wins, and linking them is the hardest part of the game.
What Forever Split Megaways lacks in mechanical novelty, it makes up for with a genuinely strange layout, two sideways strips fighting against six downward reels, and the funniest, most cohesive theme the studio has shipped in a long time. It is absolutely worth the 100x buy for anyone who wants to chase that persistent multiplier, provided they can stomach the reality of a medium-volatility math model that occasionally ends in a brutal settlement of next to nothing.
