Wheel Of Fortune: Ultra 5 Reels Pokies
A screen filled edge to edge with 3D effect spinning reels makes playing the Wheel Of Fortune: Ultra 5 Reelspokie a slightly dizzying experience, but when a game follows a popular topic and comes complete with multipliers, wild substitutions and a couple of bonus rounds with guaranteed payouts, it’s well worth seeking it out across the many casinos that carry games from developer IGT.
The game title is as glossy and colourful as players would expect from a pokie based around a gameshow, but this, a few stars in the background, and the control panel, take up the whole screen, and anyone wanting to see how it all works will need to hunt for the ‘Pays’ button. (Hint – it’s tucked away at the very top of the game.)
Those controls can be used to set a minimum bet level of 0.50, while the maximum that can be wagered on a spin is 10.00. There’s 30 fixed paylines running left to right across the reels, and in the normal run of things, wins occur with 3, 4 or 5 of the same symbol landing across any of those lines, on adjacent reels starting from the left side, although wilds and scatters will work their magic in different ways.
Playing Wheel Of Fortune: Ultra 5 Reels
Lots of sparkling symbols fill these reels, and the lowest value wins are created by diamond encrusted cherries, which return 5 coins when landing on reels 1, 2 and 3 across a payline, and 25 or 100 when they also stop on reels 4 and 5. Equally blingy oranges and pears are both valued at 5, 25 or 125 coins, while some glittery grapes pay out 5, 25 or 150 coins.
Traditionally, the number 7 has been a high value symbol on Poker machines, and this one sticks to that tradition by having green, purple, white, blue and red versions. If any mix of these land across a line on 3, 4 or 5 reels, the win will be 5, 15 or 75 times the coin value and if a single colour 7 creates a winning combination the returns vary from 10, 75 or 150 for the green, to 25, 100 or 400 coins for the red.
Wheel Of Fortune: Ultra 5 Reels
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Bonus Features
There’s lots of extra features to spice up the normal run of play, and the one that’s likely to appear most often is the wild substitution, where a big red wild symbol can replace any of the others, apart from scatters, to help complete winning lines or extend runs of matching symbols across extra reels for a bigger prize. It will also transform into a random multiplier of between 2x and 5x, boosting the value of the win by the amount shown, and what’s even better is that more than a single wild completing the line will combine the multipliers, with wins of up to 25x the base value possible.
The Scatter Wheel feature is triggered by any 3 wheel symbols appearing at once, and when this happens, each of them will transform into a bonus wheel with various prize sections on them. Once they have spun and stopped against a pointer, the accumulated prizes are awarded.
If the Ultra Wheel symbols stops on reels 2, 3 and 4 at once, a second bonus round begins. Players get to spin bonus reels and will land multipliers of up to 10,000 coins if the perfect combination is landed.
The Verdict
Wheel of Fortune: Ultra 5 Reels is perhaps the ultimate version of IGT’s games based on the popular TV show. It’s been adapted from the original format until there’s pretty much no connection to the series apart from the title and a few wheels, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as the end result is a pokie that delivers solid gameplay and some interesting bonuses.
The wild multipliers in the base game are a nice little treat and while getting the ideal 5x on more than a single wild is going to be comparatively rare, even the basic 2x is more than players get in most pokies. It’s the bonus rounds that are going to bring in the big bucks however, and any time one of them is triggered, players are guaranteed to end the round with some sort of reward, even if it’s not the 10,000-coin jackpot.
There’s not much that can be said against this pokie and the popularity of the Wheel of Fortune range means that not many other people have found major faults with it either. The minimum and maximum stakes might not suit some players, but other than this, it’s a good game to try out.