Bars & Sevens Slot Machine
If you can’t guess from the game title what the content of this new Novomatic slot game is, we’d imagine you haven’t played much in the way of classic fruit machines before! This game features a collection of bar and seven symbols in conjunction with Novomatic’s lucky star scatter. They clearly wanted this to be a simple clean fruity so that’s pretty much all you get!
Honestly no tricks, there’s no wild, no free spins, multiplier or other secondary bonus feature in play on the slot. What we have here is a straightforward honest to goodness gambling game, with a completely no frills approach. With modern fruit machines such as Hot Slot out there from rival manufacturers and even Reel King within their own catalogue, is there room for such a sparse slot today?
How to Play Bars & Sevens
Well, the game is, as a result of its design, extremely simply to play, you won’t need hours figuring out how this slot works. There’s 1-25 pay-lines to choose from and a decently wide bet range to cover most stake sizes and bankrolls. Also, again due to its simplicity, the game plays very fluidly on mobile devices and the buttons are nice and easy to see/touch even on a smaller screen.
A couple of weird things in the slot, starts with the auto-play, rather than having a number of spins to pick from, once you hit auto-spin, the slot will keep going till you press stop – I can see that being dangerous if you aren’t paying attention! Also, the playing card gamble game which features on most Novomatic machines is only available when you are spinning manually, if you like to use that on your smaller wins as many players do, you’d be better off controlling this slot yourself rather than letting it spin away.
One slightly novel feature is the spins counter in the top left, one of my own strategies for bankroll management is to keep track of how many spins I’ve played. I’ll set a limit of what I want to bet, count how many spins that is for my stake and walk away at that point, up or down. Most slots don’t track this but Bars & Sevens, along with a couple of other recent Novomatic titles, does.
Gameplay & Features
Symbol wise you get 4 different kinds of lucky sevens and 3 types of bars, that’s in addition to the star scatter symbol – which is a scatter pay only and does not trigger a free spins round, or other bonus. It does however pay out in any position on the reels and in the absence of a wild, is thus the only symbol which doesn’t have to be in sequence on a pay-line to throw you some cash.
Novomatic haven’t publicly listed the RTP or variance for this slot just yet, so I can only tell you how it feels. Personally, given the RTP on their games tends to be high, I’d say it’s fair to assume the same applies here. After a couple of long play sessions, the variance seems to sit in the middle of the spectrum, clearly aiming to appease a wide slot playing audience.
Summary
A few novel animations for the win sequences and a couple of bespoke sound effects aren’t enough to hide the fact that this is a very basic game from an audio visual perspective. Other manufacturers have proved recently that fruit machines don’t have to be bland or bare to be easy to play. That said, for fans of the classic slot, this ticks all the boxes you could ask for in the genre, it just doesn’t really add any new ones.
