The Bees Knees Pokie
There’s quite a buzz about The Bees Knees online pokie from Microgaming. It’s an unusual take on their customary 3-reel, single payline games and has a fun bonus round with big multipliers as well as the classic Nudges, Holds and other random features that this developer are famed for.
With a hive full of cartoon bees flying around the game and paying out some of the biggest wins on the reels, The Bees Knees is a honey of a pokie game, so let’s see how it all plays out.
Having A Knees Up
At first glance this is pokie looks as busy as the bees that it’s themed around, with the actual reels confined to a small area towards the lower half and some honeycomb beehive sections above them.
Surrounding everything is a big picture of various bees buzzing around and doing their thing, with some cool bees in sunglasses and gold chains waving wads of cash around and a beautiful lady bee looking on in admiration.
The Bees Knees
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There’s a Nudge game to the side that lights up during one of the bonus features and along the other side is a payout table that lists how many multiples of the bet will be won each time matching symbols line up across the payline that runs through the middle of the reels.
Several of the lower value symbols will be familiar to anyone who has played a Poker machine before, with the bottom of the table taken up by cherries that reward them with 2x their stake and oranges that are worth 4x.
Other fruit symbols include grapes that pay 8x the stake when landing across the line, plums at 16x and the watermelon slices that are worth 20x. Next up in value are a couple more symbols that feature in lots of other pokies, namely the Bar which pays out 40x and a 7 that returns 80x.
Finally, we see a couple of bespoke images, with the beehive rewarding players with 160x their bet, but the jackpot comes from landing 3 examples of the cool bee across the payline, with players winning a sweet 1000x their stake when this happens.
To decide how much to actually bet per spin, players should head to the set of control buttons underneath the reels where they can adjust the amount from as little as 0.10 up to 10.00. This may not sound like a very high maximum, but it’s pretty standard for this type of pokie and still gives players up to 10,000.00 if they hit the jackpot.
Bee Bonuses
Now it’s time to see what those honeycombs above the reels do. Landing 3 pots of honey across the line starts off a bonus feature that takes place across the sections of the hive. Players initially click on a Stop button which will reveal the numbers 1, 2 or 3 for a prize amount, and then multiplier amounts of between 10x and 120x will be displayed across the honeycomb, although there’s a sting in the tail, as 5 of these are instantly removed.
There’s then the option of choosing a remaining multiplier that’s offered up, or turning it down, whereupon 5 more will be removed and the process repeats until a multiplier is accepted or only 1 is left. It’s a simple but fun round that involves a little bit of judgement to get right.
A couple of other randomly triggered bonus features that have been seen in other Microgaming 3 reel pokies also make appearances in The Bees Knees. If players see the Shifta feature has been awarded, they can just watch reels spin up a guaranteed win, while Nudges are a way of moving reels up or down a notch to try for a winning combination, with options to bank them for the next time or gamble them.
If 2 symbols are nudged into place, the Let ‘Em Spin feature can spin the other reel for a guaranteed win, while seeing a shaking reel means that players just need to hold it in place for yet another certain prize.
The Verdict
With lots of cartoon bees across the background and reels of this game, and plenty of bonus features to keep things humming along nicely, The Bees Knees is a quality game from a trusted developer and despite having a somewhat limited bet range, players can scoop some decent wins along the way.