What Money Cart 4 is, and why it has no base game
Money Cart 4 has no base game. That is not a complaint, it is the whole design. Relax Gaming built the Money Cart line for markets where the bonus buy is banned, the UK first among them, and its answer was to delete the part of a slot that players buy their way past. Ordinary spins here pay nothing at all: no lines, no ways, no cluster wins. The only thing a spin can do is land bonus symbols, and three or more of them open the Re-Spins round, which happens on roughly one spin in ten.
The round plays out on a grid of 6 reels and 4 rows that can grow to 8 rows while you are in it. You start with 3 respins. Every time a new symbol lands anywhere on the grid, that counter goes back to 3; when a full respin brings nothing new, the round ends and everything on the board is paid at once. The RTP is 96% and Relax ships it as a single version, so there is no lower tier for an operator to select. That is a real advantage over Money Train 4, whose 96.1% can be swapped for 94% or 90%. Volatility is rated 5 out of 5, stakes run from 0.10 to 60 a spin, and the win is capped at 15,000x.
Cash symbols carry a value, but the modifiers are what turn a round into a payout. Collector gathers the value of every symbol on screen and adds the total to itself. Payer pushes its own value onto every other symbol. Sniper doubles the value of up to eight symbols. Arms Dealer converts up to four cash symbols into feature symbols. Necromancer revives between two and seven symbols that have already been used. Unlocker opens an extra row. Reset Plus refills the respin counter. Most of them also exist in Persistent form, firing again on every remaining respin, and in Adjacent form, hitting only neighbouring positions. That comes to close to twenty distinct symbols, resolved top to bottom and then left to right.
Two of them are the reason to play the fourth game rather than the third. The Upgrader converts standard feature symbols into their persistent versions, which is how a flat board turns into a compounding one. The Persistent Shapeshifter changes identity after every single spin, cycling through Collector, Payer, Sniper, Arms Dealer and Unlocker, and it keeps doing it until the round is over.
Set against the rest of the line, Money Cart 4 is the biggest and the roughest. Money Cart 2 paid a remarkable 98% RTP for a 5,000x ceiling. Money Cart 3 dropped to 96% and doubled the cap to 10,000x. The fourth holds 96% and pushes the cap to 15,000x. What you are buying with each sequel is headroom, and you are paying for it in variance rather than in RTP.
