Black Widow Pokie
Nothing to do with the American name for a redback spider, or the Marvel character played by Scarlett Johansson in the movies, Black Widow is instead a pokie themed around a murder mystery, with various husbands populating the reels along with the beautiful woman who has dispatched them.
While the theme may be a bit grim, the potential winnings are far from tragic, as it’s got extra features such as stacked symbols, wild substitutions, free spins and a bonus round within the free games that can lead to some big multipliers being paid out.
It’s part of the IGT range, which means players can be sure of fair returns, quality gameplay and plenty of interesting features that can see players making a killing when the right symbols land in the right places.
Playing Black Widow
A creepy gothic look gives this pokie a distinctive atmosphere, with cobwebs in the top corners and an ornate frame surrounding the 5 reels. 40 fixed paylines makes the minimum bet 0.40, but those players who like to make bigger wagers can go all the way up to 2,000.00 per spin.
Wins are calculated as multiples of the amount bet per line, with players needing 3, 4 or 5 of the same type to stop across a payline running left to right for a prize. To make this a little easier, symbols can be stacked several high on each reel.
Colourful playing card 9, 10, J, Q, K and A symbols carry rewards of between 1x, 6x and 11x the line bet, up to 5x, 10x or 15x depending on which ones land.
The 3 unfortunate male characters are worth more, with each of them returning 7x, 15x or 25x the line bet to players, while only 2 of the widow symbols needs to land to get a win of 4x. A full line of 5 widows is worth 50x and even this is topped in value by the wild symbol that’s likely to be the most commonly-seen bonus icon.
Black Widow
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Bonus Features
The wild is simply the game title, and 2 of these across the reels will pay 10x the amount staked per line, with 3, 4 or 5 of them being valued at 50x, 250x and 1000x. It will also substitute for all except the bonus symbol and this way, it can create a winning line where there wouldn’t be one without it.
The bonus symbol is an open bottle of evil-looking green poison, and when this stops on reels 2, 3 and 4, players will be treated to 7 free spins, during which some further bonuses can be triggered. The Web Capture feature will then be in play, and this essentially sees multipliers being added up when the black widow or her victims stop in the middle position of reel 3.
Each character symbol has a different multiplier attached to them, and these build up in their own individual meters throughout the free spins, getting credited at the end of the round. The black widow will pay out the total value of the multipliers for that spin, increasing the value on each of them as she does so.
Because the bonus symbol can re-trigger the free spins, it’s possible for the multipliers to keep adding up, although a maximum of 1000x the total bet is in force, which still equals a fairly huge prize, especially at the higher stakes.
The Verdict
For some reason, murder is quite a popular topic for pokies to follow and Black Widow does it in an appealing style. There may be only 4 characters involved in the plot, but they are all very well designed, as is the rest of the game, with great attention to detail being paid to the background and surroundings to the reels.
Of course, if the game didn’t play well, then no amount of smart design will help it, so fortunately we have a pokie that comes with a host of interesting features, some of which, like the stacked symbols, will be seen on every single spin.
Others, such as wild substitutions, may not happen quite so often, but can act to increase the frequency of payouts, while the bonus round may be a little tricky to trigger, however, it’s well worth the wait, as the wins can be pretty substantial throughout them.
This is mainly due to the Web Capture part of the free games, and while it’s not guaranteed that players will fill the multiplier meters up during this round, they should be fairly certain of getting a few of the victims collected for a nice win at the end.