Ocean Fantasy Slots
Make no mistake about it, Octopus Gaming have one of the most mixed bags imaginable when it comes to their range of video slot titles. For every super sleek swashbuckling adventure like Aladdin’s Treasure, you’ll find an old duffer like Bankroll Reload, and this makes it extremely difficult to gauge quite what you’re going to get when you load up one of their titles.
Unfortunately, Ocean Fantasy is a game that sits closer to the latter category than the former. Although nowhere near as basic as some of Octopus Gaming’s classic slots, the game looks like something found in a deep sea trench that has never seen the light of day and – in truth – its all round presentation and playability mean that perhaps it would have been better off left there.
Taking The Plunge
Aesthetics aside, Ocean Fantasy is a 5-reel, 25-adjustable payline game featuring free spins, wilds and a bonus round. Bets in the game start from just $0.01 per line and go all the way up to $5, meaning it can be played from as little as $0.01 or as much as $125 per spin, giving players a good range of wagering options and making it suitable for many different types of bankroll.
Payouts in the game start from 3x your stake per line for matching three sea horses and steadily increase up to a massive 3,500x your line bet for finding five pieces of coral (at least we think it’s coral – but more on that issue when we get into the game’s graphics!). Wilds can also be substituted for any regular symbol to create winning paylines, meaning successful spins are fairly frequent.
A diver represents Ocean Fantasy’s free spins symbol and also acts as a scatter, meaning you can win bonus spins for finding three anywhere on the gameboard, while the treasure chest symbol that triggers the bonus feature must be matched on a valid payline in order to be successfully activated.
Out of its Depth
Boy oh boy, where to start with the graphical design of Ocean Fantasy. The game’s symbols all feature some kind of sea life, with sea-horses, fish with umbrellas (?!), octopi, puffers and sharks all among the lower-value icons. Beyond that, however, things start to get a little less clear.
A yellow ball of we-don’t-know-what, some kind of underwater plant-life and the aforementioned coral are up next in the payout scale, leaving players totally guessing as to what the icons they’re rooting for are actually supposed to be. Yes, we know the design is intentionally cartoon-y, but the artwork is also slap-dash to the point of being indecipherable, making the reels very hard to read.
Despite being an eyesore, however, the graphics in Ocean Fantasy are a masterstroke compared to the game’s background ambience, with a roughly three-second long clip of vaguely underwater sounds being played on constant repeat to leave players reaching for the mute button in minutes.
Sunken Features
Thankfully, Ocean Fantasy does have a couple of bonus features that at least go some way to making up for its all round shoddy presentation. The first is a free spins game that is activated by finding three diver scatter symbols anywhere on the five reels, with players winning 5, 10 or 15 bonus spins.
The second is a conventional picking game that is triggered by finding three or more treasure chests on an active payline. Once this has been achieved, players are transported to a different screen where they’ll get the chance to open three treasure chests and win up 5,400x their stake per line.
These two features actually complement each other quite well given that – unlike in a lot of video slots – the bonus round can still be triggered during free spins, but you’d have to say that the most common outcome of five free spins is a little on the low side compared to most other video slots.
Having A Bubble
All told, Ocean Fantasy is a really unusual game – and not in a good way. The theme is poorly executed and bordering on the nonsensical, while the sound effects genuinely seem to have been chosen to annoy rather than entertain. The bonus features do at least redeem the slot’s gameplay slightly, but as we said above, five free spins is not enough to have people rushing back for more.
