Fire Horse Pokies
There’s 720 different ways to line up winning combinations across the unusually-shaped reels of Fire Horse. This pokie from IGT has a slightly confusing theme, mainly filled with horses and fire (unsurprisingly really, given the name), along with crystals, coins and a clay pot.
Quite what it’s all supposed to mean is anyone’s guess, but it all looks nice enough and there’s the potential for some nice wins along with a free spins game, wild substitutions and scatter payouts.
Like all IGT pokies, there’s a decent return to player ratio, and this trusted developer has been at the forefront of the industry for decades, so despite the odd theme, they clearly know what people are looking for and have designed Fire Horse to meet that demand.
Playing Fire Horse
The first thing to notice is the way reels are laid out across the game, with 5 reels and number of symbol positions being 3, 4, 5, 4, 3 to give it a diamond pattern. Using the MultiWayXtra format creates wins with 3 or more matching symbols on adjacent reels from the left or right sides. If the same symbol appears more than once in the same reel, the win will be multiplied by however many times it’s in there.
There’s a minimum stake of 0.50 per spin and a maximum of 50.00, so most players should be comfortable with that range, although it means there’s no way to test it out for a tiny bet.
Flames flicker behind the game, and it has the symbols spinning against plain black reels. As in many pokies, the playing card J, Q and K icons will fill much of the screen as they spin up the smaller, but more frequently occurring wins.
The J for example pays out 5, 15 or 50 coins when it lands on 3, 4 or 5 reels at once, but of course this can be multiplied with further symbols on a single reel, while going up in value, the K pays out 5, 15 or 100 coins.
Wins of 15, 30 or 125 coins come from the clay pot and then it’s on to the horse symbols where a white horse pays 20, 50 or 300 coins and the red/orange one is worth 25, 75 or 400, but the biggest wins in normal play come from the Fire Horse game logo that’s worth up to 1000 coins when it lands across all 5 reels.
Fire Horse
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Bonus Features
A wild symbol can land on the middle 3 reels and can appear as a stacked symbol, covering a whole reel or even all 3 at once for some big wins. It’s not worth anything on its own, but will act as all but the scatter to create extra winning lines.
Green crystals make up a scatter symbol which can stop in any 3 or more positions to pay out 2x the total stake per spin, while 4 scatters pays 10x and there’s a win of 50x the triggering bet when 5 scatters appear at once.
Bonus wins and a free spins game are triggered by a purple orb of some sort. It might not be obvious what it is, but as it takes players to the main bonuses, they probably won’t be too concerned.
Anytime it stops across all 5 reels, there’s a 50x prize followed by 8 free spins. If more than 1 line of bonus symbols appeared, the number of spins is multiplied and in the unlikely event that all positions on all reels are filled with it, a total of 96 free games will be awarded.
During the bonus round, there’s a blue orb on the reels that will repeat the free games if it stops on 5 consecutive reels, plus it will pay out 50x and can also be worth up to 96 spins if enough of them land at once.
The Verdict
It’s perhaps a strange and somewhat confused theme, but it may make sense to someone and anyway it looks pretty good, so let’s not focus on that issue too much.
The reel layout and way in which symbols can be in any positions should lead to lots of winning spins, even if those wins may tend to be relatively small. Of course, having more than 1 matching symbol on a reel can multiply the win several times over, and there’s always a good chance for wild substitutions, scatter payouts or entry to the free spins game.
Although players may just get 8 spins, the potential for more is there, with the blue bonus symbol adding some more to the end of the current round, so anyone who doesn’t mind symbols of flaming horses and random clay pots should find Fire Horses to be a decent pokie.