Rival Casinos and Software
Rival, or ‘Rival Powered’ to give them their official title, are a relative preschooler when compared to ‘ancient’ brands such as Microgaming or Playtech, having only been around since 2006. They’ve had a little difficulty in establishing themselves as a top casino gaming brand, but with a lot of hard work they’ve started to become taken very seriously in this competitive arena.
Rival games are bright, bold, and a great deal of fun. There now have 160 titles to their name, supplying over 50 casinos with slots, table and other gambling games.
Best Rival Casinos 2015:
Rank | Casino | Sign Up Bonus | Review |
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Rival history
Canada-based Rival burst onto the scene in 2006, backed by a team of industry experts and design and development specialists. Their initial remit was to offer a complete E2E casino gaming solution to enable casino site owners to maintain a design front-end while allowing Rival to deal with all the casino-based number-crunching as required. The first four casinos opened by Rival were Cocoa, DaVinci’s Gold, This is Vegas and Paradise-8.
The main catalyst behind Rival’s immediate success was their range of ‘i-Slots’, a new concept in online slot machines where the games were interactive instead of simply relying upon endless static play. As players played the slots, a developing story would unfold, and of course the more the players played the game, the more of that story was revealed. Rival had a dozen casinos opened by 2008, and that number reached 50 in 2013.
In 2010 the company suffered some issues when a handful of rogue casinos opened using Rival software, but since then Rival have learned their lesson and much more careful about whom they license to, regaining their previous impeccable name.
Rival’s games
Slots
Rival were the first company really to attempt to take slots beyond the concept of ‘hit the spin button and watch the reels’. Their ‘i-Slots’ range of games featured progressive storylines that were revealed as play developed. All these games follow the same basic template, and even have a chat applet so you can chat to your fellow slot aficionados while you are spinning the reels. Despite this inventive design, Rival’s slots are usually not found outside of casinos that are not run – back office wise at least – via Rival themselves.
Some of Rival’s best games are Hole in Won, Summer Ease and Secret Garden.
Table Games
Rival makes a very decent range of table games, even though the number of titles is a little limited. Play at a Rival-powered casino and you’ll be able to enjoy baccarat, blackjack (two versions), craps and roulette (also two versions), plus some rarer games such as casino war and red dog.
Video Poker
You can play seven versions of video poker at a Rival-powered casino, although these games appear to be among the weakest you’ll find within Rival’s portfolio as they do not play, look or sound particularly great. The RTPs are in the 98-99% range, and most familiar varieties – Jacks or Better, Deuces Wild and Joker Poker – are all covered.
Other Games
Rival must be one of the few casino software companies that provides a gambling version of the popular number game Sudoko, although the Rival version seems to have only a small amount in common with the version you see in newspapers and magazines. Rival also provides a small number of scratch card games.
Live Casino
At the time of writing, Rival does not provide a live casino.
Payouts and jackpots
Rival has four games that provide progressive jackpots: Money Magic, One Million Reels B.C., Strike Gold and Major Moolah. The payouts created by these slots are not too amazing (the record is $300,000 on Money Magic) but they are paid on a regular basis, with the average waiting time for a progressive jackpot win being between one and five months.
The payout percentages for Rival’s slots all typically range from between 93% and 96%.
Rival’s Casinos
At the time of writing there are over fifty online casinos on the internet that either use Rival’s E2E casino solution or licence out Rival’s casino games. Among the best Rival-powered casinos are BetCave Casino, Sunset Slots Casino and Pantasia Casino.
Rival – software and platforms
Rival uses Adobe Flash, Javascript and php to provide its software solutions, which means it may be seen as being a little ‘behind the times’ when new technologies – HTML5 for example – are available. The heavy use of Flash means Rival casinos are not likely to work to well on Macs, or systems powered by Android or Linux.
It wasn’t until early 2014 that Rival announced they were intending to make their software titles mobile-friendly using HTML5. At the time of writing, 17 3-reel slots, 11 5-reel slots plus blackjack and roulette (American and European) were available to Android (via Chrome) and iOS (via Safari) users.
Pros and cons
Pros
- Some inventive games in the i-Slots range
- Good moves (finally) towards mobile device owners
Cons
- Rival previously had a poor reputation for enabling poor-quality casinos
- Limited jackpots, and only four games with ‘medium range’ progressive jackpots
Conclusion
For a company that has been around quite some time, you’d think that take up of Rival’s games would be a lot greater than it actually is, but none of the huge casino names have anything to do with Rival’s software.
In the meantime, most of Rival’s games can only be found at ‘niche’ casinos, and some of them are not worth the bandwidth they occupy. Some of them are pretty darn fine though – just make sure you do your homework before you sign up.