Fireworks Slot
Fireworks is a 5-reel video slot powered by Realistic Games. In it, the star-studded night sky is aflame with exploding rockets. Players sitting down to play the game itself, though, will be hoping to make it rain with money, not manufactured meteors. Fireworks, which boasts ten fixed pay-lines as well as colourful, cartoonised graphics, is available at a host of online casinos, and can be played on a range of devices.
Given the name, you might be expecting a rather explosive encounter with fate when you sit down to play Fireworks. And while it’s not as explosive as it could be – there’s no progressive jackpot, more’s the pity – you can have some fun playing along. In the interests of gambling wisely though, you should bear in mind that old instruction issued to children with sprinklers: handle with care.
Lighting the Fuse
Given the limited number of pay-lines, players are only allowed a certain betting range per spin. The minimum coin size is 0.02, and the maximum is 5. The maximum number of coins permissible per line is one, meaning you can stake up to 50 credits per spin of the reels. The return-to-player average of Fireworks is 95.15%.
The Fireworks slot favours a cabinet-style design, though the reels themselves are transparent, the better to see the backdrop, which features a row of darkened houses beneath a star-pocked sky. The windows of the houses glow orange, suggesting the inhabitants are staying up to watch the firework display overhead. The Fireworks game logo sits above the reels, and a rocket blazes past in the background, leaving a warm orange streak.
Generic Symbols, Savourless Sound
You might be expecting Roman candles, sprinklers, air bombs, flares and confetti cannons to take up residence on the grid, but that’s not the case. The symbols in Fireworks are rather disappointing, as many of them have nothing to do with Bonfire Night. There’s a square-shaped purple gem, a red gem in the shape of a heart, a large diamond, a circular blue gem and a couple of bars of gold. There’s also a pile of rubber-banded banknotes, pink 7s and, the lone relevant icon in the game, a soaring rocket imprinted with the initials FW (for firework, presumably).
We were disappointed with the audio, too. We’d expected to hear the sound of exploding rockets, the whizz-bangs associated with Guy Fawkes. Instead, the soundtrack is dreary and forgettable – generic, tuneless, even headache-inducing. When you hit a win, you hear a couple of pops, akin to hearing fireworks detonate from five or six miles out. The best you could say is that this aspect of the game is underwhelming.
The Pay-Table
Ah, the all important pay-table. Just what do those damn icons represent? Well, it should come as no surprise to you that one of the game’s highest-paying symbols is the pink 7. Win 30x your stake-per-line for three in a row, 60x for four or 150x for five. For the gold bars, it’s 20 for three, 40 for four and 100 for five. These exact figures are the same for the icons that represent bundles of cash.
The best-paying symbol is the rocket, which pays 250x for five, 100x for four and 50x for three.
A Lack of Bonuses
The absence of bonuses is somewhat disappointing. There are no special symbols to shoot for in Fireworks – no scatters, no wilds… It’s almost enough to make you want to throw a firework at the sky and set the whole firmament ablaze! But hold on just a second there, would-be arsonist. There is a Firework feature, which might just put the colour back in your cheeks…
Every time you spin the reels, you won’t fail to notice the lit fuse lying underneath. You want this fuse to burn down and light the firework sitting aslant the reels, but the only way to get the fuse to burn is to hit matching symbols. When the fuse finally burns down, the Firework feature kicks in. Just press the button to pick a random reel, which will contain matching symbols. The other reels will subsequently re-spin, with each containing at least one of those symbols to trigger a guaranteed win.
Bang or Bust?
Despite the epithet, with its connotations of fun and excitement, Fireworks is a pretty basic slot title. Sure, it’s colourful and cheerful, but we can’t understand why the theme – and the audio – don’t match the concept. Some free spins bonuses would’ve been nice, too. Ultimately, Fireworks leaves you feeling somewhat short-changed.
