Online Casinos & Slot Machines

Welcome to Online Casinos & Slot Machines [.co.uk]. Perhaps a litle unsurprisingly, the focus of this site is on online slot machines with lots of information on games that particularly appeal to me and the places that I play them. As a long-time online slot player myself, I've written up a variety of slots and casino reviews and articles on new games or what I deem to be interesting developments which will hopefull assist you in making the right decision as to where and what to play.

Every game reviewed on the site is available to play online although the country you reside in might have a bearing on whether or not it is available to you. UK residents however can pretty much play any online slot machine in a regulated environment at the casinos listed around the site.

Below is a chart showing online casinos that take UK players and have Novomatic slot games. Click any link or game to visit that casino.

This Summer has seen numerous new games being added to the various casinos’ portfolios. Beginning with Microgaming, we have Avalon in HD (wow! lol) and another old Rabcat game has been added to the MG Viper platform ‘The Legend Of Olympus’. (see photo) Let it suffice to say that typical of Rabcat games the variance is extremely low and your balance tends not to rise or fall much from the starting point even on a long session. The new releases need some information though:

Firstly, we’ve got a MG ‘BOGOF’ on the first 2 games (buy one get one free!) as despite a diversion from the usual 243-way games they are 25-line efforts and clones. Kitty Cabana and Hound Hotel being the titles. Maybe MG associate cats with ladies and dogs with men and felt it necessary to have both themes as a result – who knows?

The games aren’t bad though. You have a random in-play feature whereby a stacked wild can appear on the middle reel for example, and split into 3 randomly-placed single wilds for the next spin. The wilds don’t multiply but assist in enhancing your chances of a decent payline, especially as you have stacked wilds on the reels anyway! 

Continue reading: Slots Review – Summer 2015 »

Updated 27th May, 2015. If, like me, you tend to be something or a medium/high roller slots player then one of the most annoying things about the Immortal Romance slot is that it often comes with a low maximum bet limit of £6 (or euros). This is because the Wild Desire feature has the potential to make 5 reels wild and pay out a shedload of coins.

In fact, if you look at the screenshot I have added to this article, you will see one such example!

So if you are looking for casinos that have higher bet limits, here is the rule of thumb as I write (in May 2015).

I’ve played at Bet365 for years and it is the best place for high roller Immortal Romance players that I have found (the game is found on the  bet365 Games tab) who have a £60 max bet option. That’s slightly surprising actually because Bet365 isn’t a “dedicated’ Microgaming casino, nor does it offer the game as a download and it is usually those casinos that have the higher limits. It has a range of games by Microgaming, Playtech, IGT and WMS but is renowned for having higher bet limits across it’s games.

They are not quite alone in offering that size of bet on Immortal Romance however. A while back, 2 casinos I used to play before the UK was banned from playing there, the dedicated Microgaming Casinos Crazy Vegas and Golden Riviera Casino also had £60 limits but I can’t check that anymore so whether it is still the case or not I have no idea.

Continue reading: Immortal Romance Bet Limits (£60 Max Bet) »

Recently, I posted an article on reasons to avoid casino signup bonuses. In that article I went into some detail about how a bonus is often more of a hindrance to a player than a help. And if you play Microgaming games, then there is a new term that is even worse!

Continue reading: The Slow Death Of The Casino Signup Bonus »

Microgaming Slots: May Releases: ARIANA and BIG CHEF

If you play at Microgaming-powered casinos then you’ll find 2 new games have been added. Sit down before reading the next sentence! Neither of them are 243-way slots! In keeping with recent releases by other software they are 25 and 15 pay-lines respectively.

Ariana is a simple ocean-themed game with expanding Ariana symbols if the stacked one fills all of reel 1 – should this initiate a winning combination of 3 reels or more, the others matching will expand too.

There is a re-triggerable bonus round of 15 free games triggered by 3 scatters, the starfish. The only difference in the free games is that the wilds become expanding too. The only pitfall is, don’t shout if you get a full screen as this low-medium variance slot only pays 250x for a maximum screen. Microgaming seem to have gone down the Net-Ent route with this game. If you want colossal wins for 4 or 5 reels of wilds, stick with Immortal Romance, Playboy and Jurassic Park. I could liken the overall play in terms of returns to Starburst .

Continue reading: Microgaming New Releases: May 2015 »

One of the most popular Novomatic slots used to be Katana which has a Japanese theme with the Shogun himself being the highest symbol, the wild. In fact Novomatic originally had a game called Shogun I had seen in Casino Holland (land based) and guess what… it was identical to the Katana slot but for some reason, presumably licensing, they re-named it for online casinos. I’ve not seen Shogun for years but Katana itself is now on a few Gaminator machines in UK casinos and online at a few casinos like Sky Vegas and Quasar Gaming.

One notable difference between the online version of the Katana slot and the land version is that the online version awards 10 free spins while the land version usually offers 15. However, you get more expanding wild symbols on the online version during those free spins.

Continue reading: Novomatic Online Slots: Katana »

After what seems like an eternity, Grosvenor Casinos (the land based chain that recently acquired Gala’s land casinos in the UK) have added 9 Novomatic slots to their mobile site.

Some of them will be familiar to regular casino players as they are direct from the Super V+ Gaminator machines found in land-based casinos while 3 of the games will probably also be familiar to FOBT players.

In addition to the Novomatic games, Grosvenor also offer slots by IGT and other developers on their mobile product so overall it’s a pretty decent option when it comes to mobile.

Here is the full list of the new Novo slot machines just added:

Rainbow Kings
Reel King
Book of Ra (Deluxe)
Just Jewels
Lord of the Ocean
Lucky Lady’s Charm (Deluxe)
Sizzling Hot (Deluxe)
Plenty on Twenty
Dolphin’s Pearl Deluxe

Click here to play them »

All of these games are also available on the Grosvenor Online Casino website for desktop, PC, MAC and laptop players as-well as on tablets and smartphones.

It’s very tempting to take a signup bonus when you play at a new online casino but it’s not usually a good idea. After many years of players “abusing” bonuses with multiple accounts, collaboration and various other methods, the terms and conditions are now very strict.

In fact, it’s got to the point where taking a bonus actually lessens your chances of winning in the majority of instances (see later for where you could be excused for the odd exception to the rule). It’s not too surprising: There’s no such thing as a free lunch and these offers are purely marketing ploys designed to prey on humankind’s something-for-nothing nature. But it works – for the casinos!

If you bear in mind that in many slots sessions, in my experience at least, there will be a time when you are ahead, you need to be in a position to cash out when that moment comes And it probably won’t happen more than once in a session. As bonuses usually come with a wagering requirement (“WR”) of 30x or more (staking 30x the bonus or deposit+bonus) and sometimes far greater, you can see the issue: you can’t cashout when you need to.

Here are some common bonus terms that will almost definitely hinder you:

Continue reading: Casino Signup Bonuses: Reasons To Avoid Them! »

So Christmas is approaching and I’m ramping down my gambling for a few days so I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at some of the online casinos I have played over the course of the year and summarise those that have disappointed and those that have done a good job.

I started the year playing exclusively slot games and finished it playing exclusively slot games. OK – with some video poker thrown in to be fair but only because Microgaming make such good multi-hand VP games. Coming into the year, my most regular haunt was Jackpot Party casino, WMS Gaming’s excellent slots-based offering.

But early in the year, Scientific Games having already bought Barcrest and more recently WMS during the previous year, they decided B2C was not their bag and they sold the casino to EGO who subsequently re-badged it as Slots Magic and then cloned it as Red Kings.

It wasn’t the same. The platform was slow, the cashouts became slower, reverse times became longer and the excellent WMS games became a bit lost among some other average games. To be honest, I’m not even convinced the RTPs stayed the same although this maybe because WMS had them set higher than advertised when I look back: I had amazing luck there. So you can’t blame that on EGO. But the interface was clunky and awkward and …

Continue reading: Casinos I Have Played This Year (Retrospective) »

This full review of Immortal Romance published on onlinecasinoslotmachines.co.uk is a follow-up to my previous older article “Immortal Romance vs Thunderstruck II“

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My first though on playing the Immortal Romance slot was: How could Microgaming hope to outdo the classic follow up to the original Thunderstruck slot?

Well, the answer was to take it’s winning formula, change the paytable and shake the features about! Like Thunderstruck II (TSII), Immortal Romance (IR) has no winlines, but needs 3 or more consecutive symbols for a win anywhere on from left to right. 3x3x3x3x3 therefore means 243-ways to win.

The symbols are 9.10.J.Q.K.A but now we have a dark underlying theme, in fact quite Gothic and in keeping with the whole Immortal Romance notion (think True Blood!). Creepy music brooding characters. We have Alluring Amber, Fang-tooth Troy, Malevolent Michael and Sinister Sarah, the highest paying character. There are only 4 picture symbols, unlike the 6 in TSII.

The pays during the Immortal Romance base game have 3×9 or 10’s as the lowest, paying just 1/6 of a credit. The highest paying symbol is Sarah, of which 3 pay 1.33 x stake. For 5-line wins, the lowest 9 or 10 will pay 3.33 x stake and the highest Sarah a whopping 20 x stake. Sarahs seldom come in over 5 reels without a wild though, so on the base 30p stake Sarahs with a wild pay £12.

Immortal Romance’s higher variance is immediately obvious when comparing to Thunderstruck II: wilds can appear together with the character symbols and not just numbers and letters! It is possible to get 5 wilds and Sarahs in the same spin, paying 65x the base 5-line Sarah win. This will become relevant when we examine the Amber bonus round! 

Continue reading: Immortal Romance Slot – A Full Review »