Apollo Rising Pokies
With 5 reels and 100 paylines of intergalactic action, Apollo Rising is a futuristic online pokie from IGT that launches lots of extra spins with expanding wilds blasting off across the game.
Enough of the space-references though, and let’s just concentrate on how this machine looks, plays and what extras are available to keep players gravitating towards these reels. (OK, maybe a few more bad puns.)
Playing Apollo Rising
This pokie is clearly something different, with symbols stacked 8 high on each reel, leaving the control buttons and a big game logo pushed over to one side of the screen. A bet range of 1.00 to 1,000.00 is offered, with wins coming from landing 3, 4 or 5 of the same symbol type across a line on adjacent reels running left to right.
Everything has a sort of retro sci-fi look around it, with cartoon astronauts and rockets flying across the reels. There’s stars and planets making up a background image,lots of flashing lights to make the controls look like the cockpit of a spaceship, and meteorites fly across the reels from time to time. Comets will occasionally fly up the reels as they spin, so it’s certainly a good-looking game, but does it play well?
Although they have been given a space-age makeover, the classic 9, 10, J, Q, K and A symbols will fill much of the reels. At the lower end of the paytable, players will win 9x, 15x or 50x the amount staked per line when 3, 4 or 5 card symbols land across the reels, while there’s 15x, 30x or 80x when the K or A turn up in the right places.
There’s just 4 picture symbols to give the game its unique appearance, but they are nicely presented and because they take up more than just one position on a reel, it becomes easier to line them up for a high-value win.
The space dog and space monkey are each double-height, while the astronaut and Mrs. Astronaut stand triple-height, aided by the jets of flames coming out of their rocket packs. The astronaut is the most valuable symbol and when he stops across a line on 3, 4 or 5 reels, players will win 50x, 100x or 300x the line bet.
It’s worth noting that with 100 paylines and reels stacked with so many symbols, it’s relatively easy to land several winning combinations in a single spin, so although payouts for individual lines may not be out of this world, by having them land so often, the returns to the players are quite good on average.
Apollo Rising
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Bonus Features
As well as an unusual layout, Apollo Rising comes with an unusual bonus round, triggered by the Wild symbol that can appear on reels 2, 3 and 4 only. Wild symbols will act as any other, which helps to complete winning lines.
This symbol starts the Rising Respinsfeature which turns any reel that it lands on into a rocket-shaped wild that fills them top to bottom.Respins are simply where the reels spin again for free, with any reels holding the wild rocket staying in place, with the number of respins that will play out equal to the number of wilds that triggered them in the first place.
The background to the reels changes to a grid pattern, making the bonus round stand out a little bit more, just in case players haven’t noticed the giant rocket symbol that fills much of the game.
If a wild respin symbol appears during the round, and extra spin will be awarded, plus of course, there will be another reel filled with the rocket for even more chances of getting a winning combination (or several) with each spin.
It’s quite possible to have 4 reels filled, which leads to all symbols on the remaining reel to be part of 5 of a kind winning lines.
The Verdict
Apollo Rising is quite a rare thing in the world of pokies, as it’s something different. While most games arrange their symbols over 3, or perhaps 4 rows, having reels stacked 8 symbols high marks this out as something highly unusual, although not unheard of.
100 lines running across them should be enough to get frequent, if relatively small, wins, and the way the bonus feature works is also something unusual.
During the Rising Respins, players should see multiple lines completed by the extra wilds, so it’s a valuable round to trigger, but there’s a couple of things that most games have and this one doesn’t, as there’s no scatter symbol, or a set number of free spins, however the bonuses on offer more than make up for this and make Apollo Rising a high quality game overall.