Year Of Luck Slot Machine
Another popular title in Spinomenal’s ever-growing library of high speed slots such as the Vikings Glory slot, Year Of Luck is a Chinese Zodiac-inspired game that features five reels and nine fixed back-and-forth paylines.
Like most other slots in this very specific subsection of the Spinomenal catalogue, Year Of Luck has been built with playability and speed of spins in mind and does not feature any complicated bonus rounds or evolving wild symbols to clutter up what is essentially an incredibly straightforward game.
While wild and free spin scatter symbols are present on each of the games main reels, this is about as advanced as the slot gets in terms of features and all of the payout information and rules are condensed onto a single screen – giving you a fair indication of the game’s pick-up-and-play appeal.
Good Fortune Be With You
With Year Of Luck containing only nine active paylines at all times, players can chose to wager anywhere between $0.10 and $10 per line per spin, resulting in a total bet of somewhere between $0.90 and $90. As such it is an affordable slot for players on tighter bankrolls, though the spins come around so frequently thanks to the fast reels that you’ll still get through a fair amount per hour.
In the standard game, payouts start from 3x your stake for matching three rat symbols and grow all the way up to an enticing 250x your bet for matching five horse icons. The game also features an ever-increasing multiplier metre than can boost these winnings further still, but more on that later.
Wild tiger symbols can be substituted for any regular symbol to complete a winning payline, while the snake scatter icons trigger ten free spins when three or more are matched. As you’d imagine, with these two benefits working in tandem, players can rack up some pretty decent combo wins.
Animal Magic
As previously mentioned, Year Of Luck is based on the symbols of the Chinese Zodiac and all 12 animals feature across its reels. As well as the rat, horse, tiger and snake icons mentioned above, this means a colourful cast of characters including pig, dog, goat, chicken, ox, rabbit, dragon and monkey symbols all feature, with each sign lovingly caricatured in a cute, comic-book style picture.
Like many slots in the Spinomenal library, the reels are bold and colourful, which provides a nice contrast to the relatively serene background of the night sky littered with stars. Each reel’s spin animation is incredibly smooth too, which is just as well as there are few other graphical flourishes.
The sound effects used in Year Of Luck are relatively basic too, with a range of staple spin and win noises doing an adequate job of scoring the game without providing anything incredibly memorable. The background music, at least, is fairly soothing and won’t have you reaching for the mute button.
Multiplier Mayhem
Like other similar slots in Spinomenal’s high-speed range such as the Undying Passion slot, Year Of Luck also compensates for the fact that it only features nine paylines by providing a multiplier metre at the top of the screen. Every time a player spins the reels without winning a prize, this metre will build one block at a time, with a new multiplier up to a total value of 16x your stake awarded for every two blocks without a win.
Once a win is triggered, your regular win amount is multiplied by the current level of your multiplier metre, meaning a maximum prize of 4,000x your stake per line (250 jackpot x 16 multiplier = 4,000) is available. Once redeemed, the multiplier resets to zero and players can start building again, but be warned – changing the bet amount during spins will result in you forfeiting any built up multipliers.
The multiplier metre can be incredibly profitable when used in conjunction with the free spins bonus, which awards ten free spins whenever three snake scatter symbols appear. More often than not, these bonus turns will enable you to build up a decent multiplier without risking an additional cent, meaning you can often cash in big immediately after drawing a blank from your free spins.
Star Gazing
Year Of Luck is an attractive slot to look at, but it doesn’t really offer anything particularly different from other Spinomenal titles in the company’s high speed range. With no bonus rounds or unique features, it is an easy slot to play, but picking between Year Of Luck and, say, the similar Viking’s Glory only comes down to personal preference between looks and sound rather than gameplay.
