Penguin Vacation

This Penguin Vacation from Playtech is definitely not a new game, it’s an oldie, but my review is new – that’s because I didn’t realise that I have not done a review on it all this while! Ah well, better late than never, as the saying goes, right? Anyway, Penguin Vacation is actually a clone of another great game from Playtech, namely Great Blue. Everything about the two games are identical, or almost identical, except for the number of paylines and the symbols used.

Needless to say, many old games, this Penguin Vacation included, have excellent paytables! Getting 5 Wilds would pay 500x the total bet, as does getting 5 Scatters, and that’s something current newer games simply do not provide! The free spins start with 8 free spins with a 2x multiplier, but you get to pick 2 fishing holes to increase them up to 33 free spins or 15x multiplier, exactly the same as in Great Blue game. Nope, it isn’t possible to get 33 free spins with a 15x multiplier – it can only be 33 free spins with a 2x multiplier, or 8 free spins with a 15x multiplier, or anything in between. A retrigger (unlimited) during the free spins would award 15 more free spins at the same multiplier.

On top of that, the Wild symbols are stacked on all reels, and it is indeed possible to get all 15 Wild symbols, for an incredible 10,000x total bet win at 1x multiplier! Can it be won at 15x multiplier? Who knows! I haven’t heard of anyone getting it though, but I have certainly heard of someone winning all 15 Wilds on Great Blue, for an incredible $200K win! How I wished it was me! Hahaha.

I can safely attest, with great certainty, to Penguin Vacation’s super winning potentials and its great gameplay, because I have played this game so many times since donkey years ago. However, I still prefer the good old Great Blue game, for some unknown reasons, but most probably because of the 5 extra paylines in Great Blue, for slightly bigger wins. Oddly enough, many other Playtech fanatics that I know of also seem to share this same preference too, hehehe.

I don’t have any old screenshots on Penguin Vacation, so I played the game one more time, just to get one winning screenshot, and even managed to get a decent 195x win. However, know for sure that wins of more than 1000x can indeed be achieved at the right time, so if you’re looking for big wins, give this old game some good bashes, and hope for the best wins to come quickly, hehehe.

The penguin family knows it's time to share some time together and its members have decided to take a cold vacation in Antarctica, where the boss is not close and where there are countless tourist attractions and many frozen delights to savor, as fish ice lollies and things like that.

That is the story illustrated by “Playtech” in its slot “Penguin Vacation” which has a structure of 5 x 3 reels and is provided with 20 pay lines; in it, this provider has also decided to incorporate a wild symbol that usually appears stacked.

To attract players, Playtech has equipped this game with a powerful feature called “Fishing Bonus” that grants the player up to 33 free games and up to 15x multiplier, and I think that's all I have to say about this fabulous feature since during more than 700 spins I could never gain access to it, so that in my particular case, I have no basis to express my opinion about how good or not it can be.

Personally, I think the round of free games should be a much easier feature to trigger since payouts during the base game are usually somewhat miserable; only in one of more than 700 spins I made, I get a profit of 18x my total bet, following payouts were always between 3x and 6x my total bet, and these are not so common as to help make a difference.

If you bet one dollar per spin, then your payouts generally do not usually exceed $0.30 or perhaps $0.75, and that's not all as you will also have to continually bear long streaks of dead spins that ultimately contribute significantly to the disappearance of your capital.

The truth is that I do not have many positives to rescue from “Penguin Vacation” slot, if I had to do it, I think I would choose its design since I think its blue color and friendly characters exercise some kind of attraction at first sight; otherwise, this video slot has been a total disappointment for me.