What on Earth Pokies
Alien abductions, fruit-shaped celestial bodies and enough spaced-out spaceships to fill another sequel to Independence Day take centre stage in Microgamings’ What On Earth pokie.
With 5 reels and 9 paylines of intergalactic action to enjoy, any Earthlings who choose to play this game will be treated to a galaxy of starry objects lining up to reward them with wild substitutions, scatter payouts and 2 separate bonus games, each of which has the potential for some big rewards.
3, 2, 1 Blast Off!
Flying out to the reels, we see lots of cartoon style symbols surrounded by a plain blue background. The game title is underneath the main part, while right at the bottom is the standard set of Microgaming control buttons, which give players the option to set their stakes from just 0.01 to a maximum of 90.00 per spin.
There is also the Expert option which sets the reels off for up to 100x automatically and can be configured to stop the spins if certain winning or losing levels are reached.
It’s a fairly simple design to this game, but the colourful symbols make up for it, with the lower value ones all being the classic fruits icons which have been turned into planets and asteroids. Players collect a prize when any of these stop on adjacent reels, on an activated payline running from the left side. Unless all 9 lines are activated, they won’t qualify for all payouts when symbols line up, so to have the whole game in play, the minimum stake is 0.09 per spin.
The paytable shows each symbol and how many coins are won, with the cherries re-designed as a flaming meteorite being the least valuable and paying out 3, 10, or 50 coins when crashing into 3, 4 or 5 positions on a line.
Next up, we see an orange star, grapes surrounded by planetary rings, a watermelon complete with some moons in orbit around it, while a green space rock is worth 25, 100 or 250 coins when landing across a line.
The top-paying symbols are worth a prize just for landing on the left side reel, with the spaceship controls being worth 3 coins for a single example and up to 500 coins for a full line, but the most valuable is the alien staring out from a porthole, as he’s valued at up to 1000 coins.
What on Earth
Unable to connect to MySQL: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory
Extra-terrestrial Extra Features
Various strange aliens are looking over the Earth and overseeing the bonus features of this pokie. The What On Earth logo is a wild symbol, although it only substitutes for the control panel and porthole symbols to help create winning lines. This is easier than it sounds though, as only a single example for these are needed in the right places, but it’s still a shame more symbols can’t be substituted for.
Still, at least the wild pays out some big prizes, with just a single example being valued at 4 coins and full lines being 7,500x.
Scatter symbols work in a slightly unusual way here, with red, blue and green spaceships all being worth multiples of the total bet per spin when landing in the right places. However, they will need to be on adjacent reels to be worth anything, and the green and blue ships will pay out just 3x the stake when they stop on 3 reels, with the red one paying up to 100x if it stops across all 5 reels.
They all trigger bonus games though, with the Contest symbol opening A Beam ‘Em Up game. The aim here is to zap as many earthlings as possible in the limited time given, with prizes ranging from just 3x the stake for abducting a pot plant, through to things like 20x for getting a dog and up to 200x for the unfortunate lady who has just got out of the shower. The more that are captured, the bigger the payouts will be.
In the Destination Bonus, players fly to different parts of the world and win up to 400x their stake if they manage to capture the Statue of Liberty, a traditional Chinese character, the Queen of England or an Egyptian mummy.
Is it Rocket Science?
This is certainly a fun pokie, with some well thought out symbols and a couple of potentially rewarding bonus rounds.
Both wild and scatter wins are unconventional however and players should check out how they work before embarking on this particular adventure, but just because they are different doesn’t make them any worse.
Although there’s no free spins round, the nicely animated bonus games should more than compensate for this and fans of sci-fi and aliens should certainly probe into this game.