Football: Champions Cup Pokie
Football, (by which we mean Soccer of course), is the biggest sport in the world and the subject of many online casino pokies and Swedish developer Net Ent are hoping to score with their Football: Champions Cup video pokie. Played out over 5 reels, where symbols are in 3 rows, and 25 paylines run across them, it’s a game of two halves, with a fairly simple base round and some far more sophisticated bonus features.
There’s a penalty shootout side game, a free spins game linked to a Soccer tournament and special wild symbols that should help players gather some extra winning spins along the way to the final whistle. The uncluttered design has an opaque backing to the symbols, surrounded by the payline indictors to each side and behind all of this, is a stadium packed with fans.
Playable from as little as 0.20 per spin, stakes can be raised in increments to a maximum of 100.00, and there are free Football: Champions Cup video pokie games available for players who want to test it out first. Winlines in the base game are created in the standard pattern of having 3 or more matching symbols across a payline, on adjacent reels from the left side and a review of the pay table reveals what each combination is worth.
Playing Football: Champions Cup
The 10 symbol is the lowest value of all, returning wins of 5, 40 or 100x the line bet when 3, 4 or 5 appear in the right places, and these amounts rise steadily when J, Q, K and A symbols land across paylines. The higher value symbols are all related to Soccer and are look like they are on badges, starting with the whistle and moving up through the goalkeepers glove, a boot, white shirt and the top awards come from landing the silhouette of a player across a line. He will pay out 40x the line bet when 3 appear, 4 are worth 175x and a payline filled with 5 player symbols sees a high limit win of 1000x.
The Soccer ball is a wild symbol and when this gets kicked into the right places it will not only pay out the best wins of up to 2000x, but also complete winlines by filling in any breaks in a run of matching symbols or extending a win further across the reels.
At any random time, between 2 and 5 overlay wilds can appear after a game, landing on top of symbols that stopped on the reels, with the aim of turning a non-winning spin into a successful game.
Football: Champions Cup
Unable to connect to MySQL: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory
Bonus Rounds
Two separate bonus symbols will trigger the main extra features of the Football: Champions Cup video pokie. The trophy is a scatter symbol that starts a free spins round whenever 3 or more appear in any positions on reels 2, 3 and 4 at once. These play out in a unique way, designed to work like a knockout Soccer tournament, and to begin with, players have just 6 spins awarded.
If they manage to land more red wild symbols than blue ones, they progress to the next stage, winning another 6 free spins in the quarter final and so on, through the semis and then the final. Winners see prizes of 20x, 100x and 500x the total bet awarded when the higher stages are reached, adding lots of coins to the bankrolls of anyone successfully playing through the free spins of this pokie.
If the Bonus symbol appears in any 3 places at once, a penalty shootout round begins where players gets an initial 5 shots on goal, and 5 turns as the goalie. There’s 4 corner positions in the goal mouth to choose from, so the striker picks where they want the ball to go and then when it’s time to try and save a shot, the goalkeeper jumps to the position selected by the player. Prize multipliers are awarded and if scores are equal at 5 – 5 once they reach the end of the initial attempts, further rounds take place, just like in a real shootout contest until sudden death, by which time gamblers should hopefully have picked up some decent rewards, unless they got it wrong each time.
The Verdict
This is one of the better Soccer-themed pokie games, at least once the bonus rounds have been kicked into play. In the normal run of the game the payouts are steady and reliable, but the visuals are not exactly stunning, with simple playing card symbols and plain Soccer-themed icons in view.
But wilds substitutions and the chance to land overlay wilds liven things up a bit, and whenever the unique free spins or shootout games are triggered, Football: Champions Cup enters the premier league.