Wonder Wings Slots
The latest slot machine release from Aristocrat is a quirky, fun filled fantasy game, the theme sits somewhere between Alice in Wonderland and the Wind in the Willows in style and imagination. Featuring an array of fantasy characters who ride into play on winged creatures, with the exception of the cracker-munching squirrel who rides a flying tortoise, because, what else?
Whilst it all might sound a little too surreal, it actually somehow isn’t, the new high definition screen and animation sequences make a theme this eclectic truly entertaining. It doesn’t hurt at all that Aristocrat have thrown half a dozen bonus features into this game mixed between base game spins and secondary bonus rounds. So the gameplay is just as exciting as the visuals!
Theme & Gameplay
Character driven slots are always incredibly playable and that is certainly the case with the Wonder Wings slot game. In addition to the Alice-like female lead and her delicate bird chariot there is a mouse mounted on a canary and my own favourite, a toad riding a bat!
All the ‘high’ pay symbols pay out the same, at 20x your bet, with only Alice granting you more at 40x, assuming of course you manage to line up 6 in a row on this 6x4 reel game with its 40 active pay lines. A range of forest themed icons from toadstool to acorn, all linked in theme with the main characters flesh out the pay-table for lower paying icons at 15x a line bet at maximum. No playing card icons to be seen which is a definite plus point in our book.
The wild symbol on the slot is ‘only’ a traditional fixed wild, however, it is eligible as a symbol in the max stacks feature so don’t count it out just yet. The scatter, a gold trophy, appears on reels two and five only and must be stacked rather than in line to trigger the free spins game.
Features
It isn’t hard to see straight through the wondrous graphics and audio effects in the base game to see that none of the symbols offer particularly great pay-outs, the reason for that is so that the crazy amount of bonus games can be valuable in their own right without being infrequent, let me run down what’s on offer!
First up and no surprise on an Aristocrat slot game is the progressive jackpot picks, stacks of four jackpot symbols on reels 2 and 5 will bring up a three trophy selection and you can choose to reveal either the minor, major or grand jackpot.
By far our favourite feature on the game is the max stacks mechanic, where if a stacked symbol appears on reels 2 and 5 which completes a win line with an active single symbol in the adjacent reel, the whole reel will expand to become stacked too. Filling entire screens suddenly becomes much easier to do and it’s mainly this feature which limits the win multipliers, this is what Aristocrat terms the flip out feature and we absolutely love it as it is two bonus features in one, in the base game!
The game also has a reel re-spin feature, where a stacked symbol appears on reels 2 and 5 without completing a win, all the other reels will re-spin once, giving you the chance to maximise usage of the max stacks and hopefully trigger the flip out feature!
Any flip out win also has the potential to randomly trigger a multiplier bonus of up to x10, it is by combining these linked bonus rounds that high pay-out potential not available in the base game suddenly appears possible.
You do, of course, still have a free spins round available which can have all these features except the multiplier within it. To trigger the spins stack the scatters on reels 2 and 5 before selecting from a pick win screen to receive between 9-30 spins, no retrigger available, but you are unlikely to need one if you get a hot bonus run!
Summary
Many people might instantly dismiss Wonder Wings as another progressive jackpot game with low pay-outs, they would be wrong! Once you understand the way this slot works, the pay-out potential suddenly becomes clear. Add in that it is an extremely entertaining game, I think Aristocrat have a hit slot here which is currently flying under the radar of many players!
