The monkey covering his eyes is my favourite, what’s yours? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then where have you been for the past decade? Emojis have infiltrated modern culture, and it looks like they’re here to stay. In fact, in 2015 Oxford Dictionaries named the crying with laughter face as their word of the year. Love ’em or hate ’em — they can’t be avoided.
Never one to miss a trick, NetEnt are cashing in on the popularity of emojis, by creating a slot themed around them! Emoji Planet is set for mainstream release this week and Fortune Frenzy players will be able to enjoy it, in all it’s glory, from Thursday (August 24th).
Back in March, we questioned if the slot would be NetEnt’s first ‘bad’ title in a while, because we couldn’t see the appeal in playing a game about a bunch of cartoon expressions. Yet, we’re happy to admit we’ve been forced to eat our words. The slot looks highly entertaining and boasts a whole host of lucrative bonus features.
Game Overview
The first thing you’ll notice about Emoji Planet is that it’s played over six reels, with five rows, instead of the usual 5×3 format. This is because the slot boasts a ‘cluster pays’ mechanism, in lieu of traditional paylines. The game can be played for as little as 20p up to £200 per spin, and will be available across all devices.
When we first heard that NetEnt were planning to release this game, we hated the theme. We thought it would look cheap and garish. Luckily, we’ve been proved wrong and Emoji Planet is actually a bright and amusing slot. The graphics are lifted directly from the original emojis, so symbols on the reels include hearts, bombs, pizza slices, kisses, aliens, and rockets. The smiley face is the game’s highest paying symbol, offering a whopping 500x your wager if you can fill the grid with them.
The star symbol is the slot’s wild, and it will substitute for any other symbol to create a winning cluster. A winning cluster is created when players collect five matching symbols, that touch either vertically or horizontally. This is actually much easier to do than it sounds, and this is because symbols often appear stacked throughout the game.
The game also benefits from an ‘avalanche’ feature. This is where symbols fall into place instead of spinning like traditional slots. It means that if you create a winning cluster, the symbols which contributed to it will explode, allowing new symbols to fall in from above. NetEnt’s Gonzo’s Quest is perhaps the most famous slot which also uses the feature and from experience we know that this particular mechanism can be very rewarding, as it gives you the chance to win again and again with a single spin.
Bonus Features
There are five symbols in Emoji Planet that trigger bonus rounds, and these are the bomb, the pizza slice, the kiss mark, the rocket and the hearts. Players will see that each one of these symbols has a corresponding meter to the right of the reels, which will fill up as you destroy symbols.
For every one of these symbols destroyed, you’ll fill the meter by one space. There are twelve spaces in each meter, and once the meter is complete, the bonus round for that emoji will be triggered.
- The Pizza – This bonus feature will add a 3×3 overlay of any symbol to the reesls. Of course as this means there’s nine matching symbols already touching, you’ll instantly win, but it also gives you a chance to create a much bigger winning cluster too.
- The Bomb – When you activate the bomb feature, eight random symbols will be destroyed from anywhere on the reels. Players will then recieve a random cash prize for each symbol, which can be anything from five to a hundred times your wager.
- The Kiss – In this round, three sticky wilds will be added to your reels. Each wild has three lives, which means they will remain on your reels until they have been part of a winning cluster three times.
- The Rocket – The rocket feature rewards players with a stack of 10 wilds that will appear on, and above, one reel. This gives players an instant winning cluster, but also means that, once symbols are destroyed, more wilds can fall in from above, giving you multiple chances to win.
- The Hearts – Last but not least, the hearts feature multiplies the total win by the number of times the meter has filled up, plus one. Naturally this means that this bonus round gets more lucrative the longer you’ve been playing.
