Day 9 - Crooked Mage - Slot Review

For Day 9, I gave one of the new studios running on the Engine.io RGS a shot: Crooked Mage by Blacklist Labs. It's a 5x4 slot with a max win potential of x25,000.

The mechanics are simple. What you're looking for is the Wild Reel Mage symbol, which fills a whole reel and substitutes for every symbol except the scatter (FS) symbol. A random multiplier gets slapped onto it whenever it shows up. In the base game it isn't sticky, and you'll only see it on a single reel if you're lucky. In the bonus game, the Mage turns sticky and can land on multiple reels at once, which is how you hit a huge multiplier. High-paying symbols connected with Mage symbols and big multipliers are the ingredients for the winning potion.

This is one of those games that reminds me why I test games over 1000 spins and see how their math feels for the player. In a 100 to 200 spin session you'll never see a game's potential unless the volatility gods are on your side that day.

Up to spin 350, we didn't trigger a bonus or bank a decent win. At spin 350 we finally triggered our first free spin round, and it didn't pay more than x10. By spin 550 we'd triggered the bonus again, and again nothing above x20.

Up to that point, the game felt like a dead spin machine: a pile of 0 wins and probably 50 bonus teases where that 3rd FS symbol just never landed.

By the time we hit our last 150 spins, we found ourselves in the bonus round again. This time we landed 2 Mage symbols on 2 different reels and finished with x241, the highest win of the day.

50 spins later, another bonus round paid x54. 30 spins after that, another one :D, and from this one we literally won 0, literally. The game made up for it right after with a x99 win in the base game.

In the last 10 spins, we triggered our 6th bonus round. In its last 2 spins we landed 3 Mage symbols but couldn't link anything, because all of the 3 Mage symbols were stuck on the right side of the screen. Painful.

6 bonus rounds in 1000 spins, plus a few decent base game wins. Decent artwork, and I loved the game music. One thing needs fine-tuning: when you link multiple symbols in different spots on the reels, you don't see the total win for the spin. A total win animation would be the missing piece.

Is it 1000 Spins Approved? Oh yes, we saw the potential of this game.