Autumn Queen

I enjoy playing a lot of Novomatic slots, but I sometimes feel their games are more suited to the casino floor than the online world. Autumn Queen at first seemed a little dull, but after playing it for a while I discovered it has some neat features, including the ability to win up to 80 free spins.

Like many of their recent games, Novomatic have chosen to use a mobile/tablet style interface even for the desktop version of Autumn Queen. I presume this cuts down on development time (and therefore cost) by only needing a single version of each slot. It doesn't take long to get used to but you can definitely tell it was intended for touchscreen rather than mouse input.

I like the fact the scatters are stacked, but as you still need to get one on each of the five reels in order to trigger the bonus its more about winning additional free spins than increasing your chances of hitting a feature at all. That might have annoyed me, but the game awards lots of extra free spins for each scatter above the minimum of five that starts the bonus.

The bonus has a "mystery reel" feature, similar to NetEnt's recent Motorhead slot. This is nice, but its annoying that the mystery reels cannot reveal a wild symbol. The top win from a single spin is only 500x your stake anyway, so it really wouldn't have hurt to give the feature an extra bit of excitement by making this a possibility.

The top line win is quite poor too at just 500 coins. The wilds and scatters have no payouts of their own too, which feels very wrong if you manage to hit almost a screenful of scatters which must surely be a very rare combination.

All things considered, there just isn't enough to get excited about in this game for me. It's fun, but I can't see me returning to it very often despite the neat free spins feature.