Phantom Island Slots
Hoist the Jolly Roger and shiver your timbers, as we head off to a ghostly pirate ship and its creepy crew in GamingSoft’s Phantom Island video slot. It comes complete with zombies, an evil monkey, cannons, treasure maps and a black-sailed ship, while players could be plundering some extra wins with expanding wild symbols, up to 30 free spins and a shot across the bows of a progressive jackpot feature. So, let’s batten down the hatches and sail off into the weird world of this cartoon-style online casino game.
The first thing that stands out is the design, which fills the screen with 5 reels, crossed by 25 paylines. Everything is set in the gloom of a night time scene, where the ship is in a harbour surrounded by hills and strange lights glow from the side of a cliff. The details even extend to the lengths of rope dividing each individual reel and the decking that sits behind the control buttons. GamingSoft rarely let us down in the design of their casino slot machines, and the Phantom Island video slot is another example of their thoughtful approach to creating their games.
They also thoughtfully provide free Phantom Island video slots for players to practice on, and low limit wagers of just 0.25 to start spinning the reels for real cash prizes. Standard symbols will need to land on connected reels from the left side across a line to get a win, although the wild should help to improve the return to player percentage.
Plundering Some Piratey Prizes
All symbols are related to the pirate theme and there’s broadly 2 groups, starting with the inanimate objects such as pistols, cannons and poison bottles, and then the characters that populate the ship will return the higher wins.
The bomb-carrying monkey returns maximum winnings equal to 500x the line bet when he runs right across 5 reels, while the blue parrot is worth 750x, the zombie crewmember is valued at up to 2,000x and the captain of this lot pays from 5x the line bet when he’s on reels 1 and 2, to the top award of 4,000x.
A skull and crossbones in a pirate hat, designed in a nice 3D style, is as wild symbol which is able to acts as any standard symbol if it’s in the right places to complete a winning line. This is also an expanding wild, so if it’s going to help, it will expand across any reel that it lands on, in an explosive puff of smoke and fire, although it only appears on the middle 3 reels.
Sailing into Some Free Spins
The ship is ploughing through stormy seas in the dramatic-looking scatter symbol which starts a free spins bonus feature whenever it sails into view in 3, 4, or 5 places at once.
The number of bonus games that will then play out depends on how many scatter symbols triggered the round, with just 10 spins awarded for 3 scatters, 20 for 4 of them, and if the ship is in view in any 5 or more places, then 20 bonus spins will begin.
While some slot machines from GamingSoft have special mixes of symbols on the reels during free spins rounds, other than the reels and background image becoming bathed in a red hue, the games are standard, although spinners should still be able to collect a few prizes before the free spins are done.
Jackpot Treasure Chest
A chest packed with gold coins and shiny jewels on reels 1, 2 and 3 is the signal that a progressive jackpot is about to be won. There are 4 jackpots shown above the main reels at all times and once this round has begun, anyone who is on the low limit bet will collect 10% of either the Mini, Minor, Major or Grand jackpot, while the percentage won rises with the stakes until 100% of any prize will be scooped by anyone at the maximum stakes.
To see which jackpot they claim, players will first need to enter a dark sea-cave, where they will find 12 treasure chests lying around on the floor. By clicking on a chest, they will reveal any jackpot level and once 3 of the same have been found, the round ends and the relevant jackpot, or at least the percentage that they qualify for, is awarded.
An Island Worth Visiting
There’s a number of pirate-themed slot machines available, but the Phantom Island video slot takes a different twist by setting it on a haunted ship, which may be inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean, but it makes it a fun game.
We like the exploding wild symbol expansions, although it won’t necessarily lead to extra win-lines being created, and while the free spins could perhaps have benefitted from a richer mix of symbols on the reels, the fact that so many spins can appear in a win means that you would be very unlucky not to collect a few special prizes in this round.
