Ocean Quest Slot
Take an underwater adventure in a yellow submarine, down through the 5 reels and 20 paylines of the Ocean Quest video slot from Games Warehouse. You’ll find all sorts of colourful creatures in the depths, and with a little bit of luck, discover the treasures that await you, including stacked, sticky, or scattered wild symbols, free spins and a friendly crab who helps to boost wins. It’s all done in a brightly coloured, cartoon style, with the symbols floating down through the viewing window of your submarine and against a backdrop of corals and shoals of animated fish.
The window is surrounded by various buttons, valves and pipes, while the controls for the game are sitting to the right side, where they can be clicked on to select bet sizes, set the Autoplay function off, or get the reels spinning just once per click. It looks great and while we hoped that the Yellow Submarine song would have been chosen as the background music, we guess The Beatles would have asked for a small fortune from Games Warehouse, but the accompanying music is still quite soothing and suits the underwater ambience.
The Games Warehouse casino slots developer is based in Derby, England, from where they have created a number of games for land-based casinos, pubs, or arcades. In recent years they have made the inevitable move to the online and mobile optimised casino markets, with a small but growing range that includes highly successful titles such as Birdz, Gold Strike and Egyptian Gold. Fully licensed by the UK Gambling Commission, their games are certified as fair and all come with high return to player percentages, so you can dive right into Ocean Quest and not feel under any pressure, no matter how deep you go.
Aquatic Awards
A review of the paytable tells us what each symbol is worth, calculated as multiples of the amount staked per line, while also revealing that in the normal run of play, you will need at least 3 matching symbols across a line, running from the left side, to win a prize. This can be modified by wild and scatter symbols however, so there’s plenty of other ways to claim some real cash awards from our fishy friends.
High card symbols 10, J, Q, K and A, each given a colourful pattern to make them stand out in the depths, will return the lower value wins. These vary from 10x, 20x, or 30x the line bet when the orange 10 symbol is seen on 3, 4, or 5 reels, through to 20x, 40x, or 60x for the bright green A.
A happy starfish and grinning purple fish are each worth a little more, while the treasure chest pays up to 500x the line stake and the submarine returns 200x, 400x, or a top prize of 1,000x when it lands on a line. An air bubble is the wild symbol of this game, and while it’s not worth anything on its own, this icon is able to substitute for others to create combinations by bridging any gaps in a sequence of matching symbols.
Fishy Features
At the end of any spin, a red crab can scuttle onto the reels and randomly replace symbols if it will then create a winning combination or enhance a win by adding symbols to the right-side reels. It’s a nice animation and certainly a nice rewarding feature that’s guaranteed to lead to a prize.
The wild symbol can turn up in a variety of ways, each helped by an animal and each boosting the odds of getting a win-line formed. In the base games, a 2x2 or 3x3-sized green pufferfish can randomly appear, with wild bubbles underneath it turning it into a giant wild symbol which can create multiple winning lines at once.
If the 5, 10, or 15 free spins are triggered by 3, 4, or 5 of the porthole bonus symbols landing at once, you will see 3 treasure chests and picking one of them will award a further wild feature during the games. A big blue whale can shoot stacked wild symbols from it’s blowhole, or you could have a seagull fly over the reels, dropping wild symbols into the mix. If a purple dolphin jumps across the game, it will leave sticky wild symbols behind, which stay locked in place until they become part of a winning combination.
Random Free Games
There’s a second free spins feature that can start at random, and while just 5 extra games will play out, the middle reel will see the crab at the end of an anchor chain that turns the reel wild throughout them, while the number of win-lines is increased to 30 during these spins.
Like the main bonus games, these can’t be retriggered, but the extra wild features should help players to come back up with some nice treasures from the deep.
Wagering Under the Waves
A simple betting system let’s you place wagers from just 0.20 per spin up to 150.00, so this is a slot for high rollers and casual punters alike. A slightly unusual layout means that higher stakes of above 2.00, need to be activated via a separate control button, which also gives you the option to Auto-spin the reels, and to set win or loss limits.
Free Ocean Quest video slots are also available, but rather than just dipping your toes in the water, why not play for real cash and claim some actual winnings? High returns ensure that taken as an average, almost all of your stakes are claimed back in winnings, and with a little luck these fishy scales could be tipped in your favour, paying out some huge coin rewards.
Other Oceanic Odysseys
With the opportunity to fill games with colourful sea creatures, treasure chests, sunken wrecks and even the occasional mermaid or two, it’s no wonder that ocean themed online slot games are so commonplace. Among the most popular, there’s the Ocean Magic video slot from IGT, which takes a more realistic look at life beneath the waves and features seahorses, turtles and whale sharks. Bubbles rise up from the depths, turning symbols wild and there’s up to 20 free spins to enjoy when the treasure chest scatter symbol appears.
Novomatic has their Lord of the Ocean slot game available for online and mobile casinos. There’s a sultry mermaid and Poseidon himself, along with the inevitable treasure chest that seems to pop up in all of these games, while a free spins round with expanded symbols is one of the main bounties from this great-looking game.
There’s lots more underwater-themed online slots games available, making this one of the more popular topics at casinos worldwide.
Anything Fishy About Ocean Quest?
This fun, feature-filled slot game is a pleasure to look at and play. We liked to whole submarine style and the way that symbols appear in the window while fish swim past, adding movement to the background of the game.
We also like the multiple wild features, especially those that are awarded during the free spins round, but having random extra wilds in play is another treat that can lead to multiple winning lines being created at once. Because it’s compatible with Android, Windows and Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads, you can dive into the rich waters of Ocean Quest from just about anywhere and enjoy the rewards that are found at the bottom of the seas.
