Taco Mania
Are you mad about Mexican food? Does the sight of tacos loaded with cheese, meat, guac and sour cream cause you to start salivating? Does even reading about tacos cause you to lick your lips? In that case rustle up a snack to sustain you and then read on. It’s time to talk tacos as we delve into the ingredients that make up Taco Mania by Zitro Interactive.
Going by the name alone, it isn’t immediately clear exactly what sort of an online casino game Taco Mania is. When it loads however, it all becomes crystal clear: this is bingo. It might seem odd devising a thaco-themed bingo game, but then there are probably stranger themes out there.
Why Not Tacos?
You’ve got to give your bingo game some sort of identity to distinguish it from all the other bingo games out there, so why not tacos? The concept of the game, daft as it might sound, works well enough in theory. In practice though, Taco Mania is a game that’s likely to leave you deeply underwhelmed. We were promised tacos and yet we don’t actually get that much of them when the game loads. Speaking of loading apparently, Taco Mania has been optimised for the Safari browser, which is fine enough, though it also works in Firefox. It doesn’t fill the screen though and it’s evident that this game was meant to be played on mobile.
Tacocat is Tacocat Backwards
With online bingo games, you’ve typically got four bingo cards and thus four chances of winning with each round of balls that are drawn from the spinning hopper. That’s exactly how it plays out here. In fact, look at the board and if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t even notice the faux Mexican stylings that have been applied, so subtle are they. Or rather so mediocre are the graphics for this online casino game. Bingo games aren’t exactly dependant upon high-res 3D graphics, but even so you’d have thought a little more effort would have been applied.
There’s a plain blue background, four incongruous orange bingo cards and a series of mosaics across the top in various colours which form the paytable. In the centre of the screen, the hopper containing the bingo balls spins rapidly. If you look closely you’ll be able to distinguish a pair of chillis arranged around the bowl, and that’s it. That is the extent to which Zitro Interactive have designed this game to look Mexican. You’re entitled to feel cheated. Where are all the tacos we were promised?
Fiesta of Fortune
The playing controls have been designed as large circular icons, in keeping with this being a mobile-compatible game. It’s been built in HTML5 so should work fine on Android and iPhone. Whether you’d want to be seen playing this game on your phone is another matter. You can just tell, before you’ve even clicked start, that the animations for this game are going to be shocking, and they are. They’re delivered at lightning speed, causing the drawing of the balls to happen in the blink of an eye. The motion of them is also completely unrealistic. Sure, it’s only a game, but that doesn’t excuse the developer from not trying.
On a brighter note, when the balls are drawn you’ll see a series of limes appear on the board, above the hopper that they were drawn from. Limes and chillies – you see, this is a Mexican-themed game after all! There’s no ability to adjust the bet level in this game, so the cost remains the same on each occasion – four coins. As for the sort of sums you could win from this game, it starts with a single coin for one line and from there it rises rapidly. By the time you score two lines you’re talking 50 coins and then if you succeed in filling an entire card with numbers you’ll be awarded 1,500 plus a bonus. After your bingo balls have been drawn each time, you’ll then be able to click play again and the limes will start to reveal numbers, giving you added ways to win.
Taco Mania Summary
Taco Mania is a below par game that doesn’t even remotely begin to live up to its name. There’s no mania to be found here and not too many tacos either. It’s all a sorry state of affairs from a developer who are surely capable of better. It really doesn’t matter whether you play for fun or play for real money: there’s not much of either to be had here. Okay, so you could strike lucky and win over 1,000 coins from this game, but then the same could be said of any casino game. With Taco Mania, the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze.
