Lucky Blue Slot

As far as I know, SoftSwiss has yet to come up with a good game that can be a hit with players. Their older games were rather uninteresting and basic, although it wasn't impossible to get some decent wins from them. Most of their games have low paytables too, so that didn't excite me at all. The later games have seen some slight improvements in them, but still trailing behind. I do hope SoftSwiss would catch up soon and offer some really nice interesting games for us to try out.

The title Lucky Blue reminds me of Playtech's Great Blue, but they aren't of the same type of games. Lucky Blue has sea creatures too, but there are no whales for a whale of excitements. Ah well, Great Blue is one game that's very hard to beat indeed, in terms of excitement and huge payout possibilities. In Lucky Blue, the Gold Bullion is the Wild symbol, 5 of which pays 5000x the line bet. It doubles all wins with it, substitutes for other symbols except for the Scatter symbol, but doesn't become stacked or expanded as Wild Reels. The happy-looking Shark is the Scatter symbol, 5 of which pays a good 200x the total bet amount, and getting 3 or more of them triggers 15 free spins but without any multiplier. More free spins can be retriggered. Hmm, there should have been a multiplier for the free spins, without which makes the game uninteresting. Too bad. As for the symbols in the game, the Anchor pays 128x, the Crab pays 128x, the Starfish pays 64x, the Turtle pays 32x, the Seahorse pays 32x, and the rest pay from 16x to 8x, all per line bet amount for 5 of each kind. Sheesh. Very low values for the symbols, as compared to the Scatter and the Wild symbols. Why this has to be so, I cannot figure out. Could have been an average paytable, but it's only a low one as it is.

I was hoping the low paytable could provide a good game play, as some other games could do, but not with Lucky Blue. The payouts that I've gotten so far from the several Free Spins games were all very low. Too low for anybody's liking. Many times they were below 5x my bet amount, and only a very few that exceeded 20x. Payouts in the base game were no better at all. Very disappointing payouts indeed, and making Lucky Blue a rather disappointing game to play.

This was the first time I had seen a SoftSwiss game so they had a lot to prove to me! Although the big boys Playtech, Microgaming and NetEnt are still dominating the on-line slot world there are more serious contenders than ever right now and names like Yggdrasil, QuickSpin and of course WMS are getting their games into a huge number of casinos these days, many of them proving just as popular - if not more - than those from the "old guard".

The other review on this page suggests this game is heavily based on Playtech's Great Blue which is a slot I absolutely adore so my hopes here high. I do see the resemblance in terms of the games theme, the symbols, and of course the name, but there are no stacked wilds on the reels in this game and no "Pick Me" phase before the free spins feature to award extra spins and multipliers so I wouldn't say this is a clone by any means. Kind of a shame in a way!

One area I do find this game to be superior to great blue is the presentation - the graphics and sound are much better in this game and the animation is far smoother, running at a much higher frame rate than Playtech's popular classic. Apart from that though "Lucky Blue" is definitely not quite up to the same standards.

I usually enjoy nine line slots a great deal but Lucky Blue doesn't seem to offer high enough wins to work with so few paylines. There seems to be an awful lot of dead spins and most of the wins on the paytable seem very small for this type of game. The wild and scatter symbols do have significant pays attached - up to 200x your total stake for five scatters and 5000 coins for a full line of wilds, but they aren't particularly large for this type of game. 50x bet for 4 scatters is above average however. A 2x multiplier for combinations including the wild symbol doesn't do much to help and even with that boost the next highest five of a kind pay is still under 30x bet. Compare that to 375x for the top symbol in Microgamings "Break Da Bank Again" and you get an idea of just how disappointing this game can be.

This slot enchants you and at the same time it makes you a stupid. Playing here at “Lucky Blue” I met simultaneously the hate and the love, and also the boredom and the emotions. And I managed to stop playing the game just after I lost over 100 Euro! Good for me that I played for virtual money because otherwise I would have been bankrupt.

I wanted to do a weak review first time, but the more I played the more I realized that it is easier to terminate a slot in only two sentences and throw into the trash all the work of the game creators behind the game. What is for sure is that because the slot “Lucky Blue” is just a copy of the well-known slot “Great Blue” (Playtech) is not an exceptional slot, but also it is not very weak.

Although it has only 9 paylines and a bet of 90 cents/spin, the weak initial impressions began to change when I realized that I can play the slot in full screen even from its AskGamblers page. Increasing the view of the slot, the submarine landscape and even the 5 reels looks different. The reef inside the ship, along with the stylized seahorses and turtles are most interesting, especially since at every spin all these are accompanied by the sound of the bubbles escaping to the surface.

Then the next good impression I had was that from the first 100 spins I won 5 Euro extra (I repeat the end was miserably with more than 100 Euro lost but this came in the last hundred spins). I said myself that despite the 9 paylines (which are a bit too few) the slot deserves a second chance. And well I did because in the interval of only 30 spins I went 3 times into Free Spins (15 Free Spins every time). I have a habit when playing the new slots: I never watch first into paytable. I let the game flow and I count myself the payouts (only at end of the game I look also into the paytable). What I liked here is that the slot pays even for “2 of a kind” (of course small sums, but still they are called payouts).

And at the end I repeat: I hated the slot because I lost over 100 Euro, I loved the beauty of the submarine landscape, I was bored when I realized that if the slot had more lines I would have obtained many other wining combinations, and I was thrilled when I “caught” a series of 5-8 Euros wins, each. Although this slot is not too weak (at least its name is inspired by the “Great Blue”).