No one, in the history of the universe has ever gone ‘Yay! Can’t wait for January!’.
It’s the Monday of months. After a festive December, winter truly kicks in, works and schools start again, and every resolution you’ve made to be a better person, you’ve broken within the first week.
And so, we look to our favourite slot software providers to brighten up our cold days and nights with some wonderful new slot releases.
We know NetEnt are going all out with what looks like an awesome Guns n Roses slot, so surely Microgaming must have something special to compete?
The exciting online slot releases
Come on Microgaming, we thought you’d broken old habits? There was a moment there when your most exciting releases were both on mobile and on desktop.
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But not January. This month, you get 2 new Microgaming online slots, and one old slot turned mobile.
Still, lets have a look to see if they are worth powering down our tablets for, and dusting off our desktop computers?
The ridiculously simply Lucky Twins slot
Challenge: watch this 1 minute video and try and count the bonus features.
How many did you count? If you are scratching your head right now, it’s because it’s a trick question. There are none.
Lucky Twins is a 9 payline slot machine, with wilds and scatters. And that’s it.
We could probably do the review of this video slot without playing it, but we won’t, because we like to play fair, and we’d hate to be wrong.
That said, you’ve got to give it to Microgaming; they dare to strip back their games, hoping the pretty graphics and old fashion mechanics will make you swoon.
To be honest, we doubt it will make us stumble.
Still, the top win here will be about 500 times your bet; so this could be a fairly easy playing game for Chinese New Years.
The surprising Peek-a-Boo slot machine
When we first had a look at both these videos, we made a snap judgement. Looking at the graphics, we were sure we’d love Lucky Twins over Peek a Boo. Boy were we wrong.
Where Lucky Twins was pure simplicity, Peek-a-Boo is all complexity.
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From what we could see you get:
- Wild symbols stacked 4 high in the base game
- 40 paylines as standard, 1024 ways to win during the free spins, just like in the Happy Holidays slot.
- The ghostbuster kids zapping ghosts for cash prizes
- Collect enough ghosts and trigger 10 free spins
- Super stacked wilds during the bonus games
- Free second chance respins of reel 4 or 5 if the game thinks you get a 4 or 5 of a kind win.
That’s a whole load of features; and with a 950 times your bet max win, probably around the medium variance scale.
Granted, the theme looks like some 90s bad rip-off of the Ghostbusters cartoons; and they weren’t that good to begin with.
But hey, if those features pay out, and this Peek a Boo slot turns out to be fun to play, we won’t care if it’s drawn by our 3 year old niece.
The Untamed Giant Panda Mobile Slot
We are going to go into a little more detail with January’s only new Microgaming mobile slot Untamed Giant Panda.
- Game of Thrones
- Thunderkick II
- Isis
- Mega Moolah
- The Twisted Circus
It’s not new, by any means, and we have no pretty videos to show you. However, you can go and play at any of our recommended Microgaming casinos, because it’s already available online.
A lot of untamed games in your future
Remember how, almost every other month, we could expect to get a ‘star slot’ in 2015
Football Star, Cricket Star, Rugby Star, Basketball Star… I’m sure if they thought that there was a big enough audience, they would have created ‘Curling Star’ and ‘Ping Pong Star’.
Microgaming love series slots. Why do something awesome once, when you can re-skin it a million times with different themes making people think they are playing completely different games?
The Untamed Giant Panda slot has three bothers and sisters already; Untamed Bengal Tiger, Untamed Wolf Pack and Untamed Crowned Eagle.
Now that they are about to transfer one to your mobile screen, the rest will no doubt makes their way over the comings months.
Is that a bad things? Is the Untamed slot series any good?
Whilst not the hardest hitting games of all time, you can deny they have beautiful graphics and some unusual features.
The Untamed Giant Panda slot is particularly good looking, but then we were always suckers for those big cuddly black and white bears.
A 243 ways to win game taking deep within the verdant Chinese forest where some great feature await, including;
- Collect a wild: For every 4 wilds that land on the same reel, that reel will then turn completely wild for 4 free spins.
- Lucky Nudge: If a scatter symbol is just out of reach, it might nudge into the reels to trigger the free spins.
- Unique gamble feature: Instead of a 50/50 chance, you can adjust your gambling odds so you can take more or less risks, and be more or less rewarded. A little like the mFortune Sherlock slot.
- Sticky wilds and free spins: Every time a wild shows up during the free spins, it will stay there for the remainder of the bonus round.
Quite excited about this new release…
Not going to lie, we weren’t massively familiar with the untamed series when we heard the news about this Untamed Giant Panda mobile slot.
But having played and read through the stats, we are quietly impressed. Obviously we don’t want to give away our opinion of it just yet, but let’s be honest; we are long overdue some brilliant Microgaming mobile slots.
Check it out for yourself at Guts Casino; they give you £€$300 in bonus + 100 free spins with no wagering requirements. Plenty to try and tame these beasts online.