Wok Star Slots
If you have ever been to China or any Oriental country (or, your nearby Chinese, Japanese or Thai restaurant, for that matter!), you would have noticed those seemingly weird looking pans they use for cooking virtually everything – from rice to noodles & fish to crabs.
Well, those are woks, and if you thought it’s impossible for us to find any use of them beyond the realms of Oriental kitchens, you, sir, couldn’t be more wrong!
Give a big, warm hand to Wok Star – a ‘wok’ themed slot from Games Warehouse that has presently got all of our attention. And take our word for it, it seems to deserve much of it! Or does it? Let’s try to dig a little deeper!
A Tasty Union
Games Warehouse is getting in on the action of what we like to call ‘mid-sized’ slots quite aggressively in last couple of years. They have released more non-penny slots in this period than any other developer, and that says a lot about the kind of market they are targeting.
Wok Star, however, isn’t all about Games Warehouse. They have had a healthy bit of help from GW Games whose mainstay is the UK market. So, all in all, Wok Star is a tasty union of these two bigwigs of slot industry.
Cooking it Up
Wok Star (it’s a wordplay on ‘Rock Star’) is a 5-reel and 20-payline slot that borrows its appearances and design from the classic slots of the last decade. It opens up with a bang-on delivery of kitchen related noises and rock n’ roll riffs, some of which, however, are not entirely pleasant.
Apart from the load-lag, heating this wok up for some hot cooking is a fairly easy process. Games Warehouse has made it a point to launch all of their new games strictly on HTML5 codec, and that helps in keeping things light, as well.
Spicing Things Up a Touch
Of course – what good is a round of Asian food without a generous hand of obscure spices and exotic condiments? That touch of spice is provided here with the wager scheme that allows you to put at stake one coin per line, valued between 20 cents and – brace yourselves - $20!
Yes, you can value one coin at $20! However, an upper cap of $200 per spin also means that you need to be careful while distributing your wagers.
Sushi, Spices and Rock n’ Roll
Wok Star is pretty easy on symbols. The largest chunk of regular symbols is made up by Chinese-scripted J, Q, K and A of cards, while other symbols include the logo of the game (pays the most – keep an eye on it!), a decorated takeaway food parcel and a massive guitar amp that even Jimmy Page would be envious of.
In the base game, typically, five-on-five combinations of regular symbols don’t yield more than 300 coins. But considering that the highest coin size allowed is $20, that’s still a lot of golden weight to carry.
Wok Star Bonuses
Bonus rounds are pride and joy of all Games Warehouse slots, and this one is no exception. There are three bonus symbols (replacing the usual scatter concept) here:
- The Wok: A wok full of food (in 3 or more) brings to you the Wok Bonus. This is a simple gamble round where the biggest draw is a Dragon symbol. Collect at least 7 Dragon symbols, and your total winning for that particular round will be instantly multiplied by 1,000 times.
- The Guitar: Three or more Guitar symbols (only on reel 5) will turn any and every amp symbol in view into a floating wild symbol. You can then play around with these temporary wilds to create some more finger-lickin’ good combos.
- Free Spins: This is a no-nonsense bonus unlocked by landing three or more ‘Free Spin’ symbols anywhere on the screen. We aren’t quite sure about the number of free spins one can be granted (as it isn’t mentioned in the paytable), but we still have a good news to deliver – free spins you get from this round carry 2x to 5x multipliers for the COMBINED winnings of all those spins.
Wok and Roll!
We love Games Warehouse slots simply because they pay a lot. It is obvious that for that to happen, the slot has to be volatile, which exactly is the case here.
Wagers are impressively large, and those who love to go the win-or-nothing way can find much to rave about in Wok Star. Newcomers, however, may want to stay away from this one until they have found their feet in the shallow end of the pool first.