Game in Action
Screenshot of the Koi Princess Slot
Visually Koi Princess is very prettily designed and offers a veritable feast for the eyes. There are plenty of lucky symbols on the reels alongside generic card symbols. The princess stands to the left and offers us her cheers whenever we win.
Once you hit the bonus features, you’ll find beautifully drawn Koi fish as well as a golden dragon in the slot and you’ll be seeing them fairly often, which is just as well for this low volatile slot. You won’t often win big, but every once in a while you might get lucky, which will feel pretty good.
The background music is also reminiscent of Asian culture, adding to the overall feel of the slot.
Bonuses
The first thing you’ll want to do when playing this game is this: hit the Bonus Bet Deactivated button and active the bonus bet. If you don’t, the bonuses will show up a lot less frequently, which would make this slot very slow indeed. You’ll pay more per bet, but it will be worthwhile.
You will soon notice that three Koi fish will occasionally appear during the base game and ask you to pick one of them. They come with four different random features, which will be more or less frequent.
Random Wilds – Those are among the most frequent you get. Your selected Koi will be jumping around in the water and splash extra wilds onto the reels for you. You can get up to 9, but even 4 or 5 are pretty decent.
Wild Reels – Here your chosen Koi will turn between 2 and 5 reels completely wild. More often than not you’ll get only 2, which is fine if the rest of the reels align to give you wins. But getting more than that means higher wins.
5-Hit feature – A wheel of fortune will determine which of the reel symbols ends up being chosen for a guaranteed 5 of a kind win during a free re-spin. This can include the wild symbol. A bit hit or miss depending on which symbol you get.
Bonus Activation – This one can happen, but you probably won’t get it as it’s rare. The bonus symbols will spin onto the reels and the bonus round gets activated.
The usual way for the bonus feature to get triggered is by landing the three dragon scatters on reels 1, 3 and 5. It can take forever, but we must have been lucky, because it happened twice for us and fairly quickly. A wheel of fortune will appear and by stopping it you land on one of four items outlined below:
Coin Win – The most boring option, because you’ll simply win about 15 to 30 times your bet and get returned to the base game.
Bonus Wheel – Easily the most interesting option, because it can win you much more than coins. You’ll have to click on a dice to determine how far the bonus wheel will advance. You’ll be able to collect lots of coins here. There are several tiers to the wheel. In the first one you simply collect coins, but on tier 2 you could end up just collecting them before moving onto tier 3. In tier 3 you can collect more coins, collect them or launch another feature: the free spin bonus or a coin jackpot, which contains 75x to 500x your bet. If you make it to the middle, you’ll get an additional 50x your bet before returning to the base game. We got the free spins here, which was great.
Wild Reel Free Spins – You can get here from the bonus wheel, like we did, or you land it on the wheel of fortune when the bonus game is first triggered. Either way, you’ll get those 10 free spins and between 1 and 5 reels will turn completely wild. Especially in combination with the previous bonus this one can pack some punch.
Sure Win Free Spins – This one can be totally awesome as you’re guaranteed a win on every spin. Your sure win is initially just 10x your bet. You start off with 10 spins and if you manage to win more on one of those spins than your sure win, it will get upgraded and henceforth your sure win will be that big win you scored before. That happened to us half through the free spins and we scored an additional free spin on top of that. We hit 60x our bet for five more spins, which was awesome.
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Summary
Koi Princess is so full of action that you won’t mind that it’s actually a low volatile slot. You’ll rarely win big, but when you do it’s usually a joy and it means you can either call it a day or you’ll continue. The appeal here is that you kind of want to see what the slot is capable of and what the different features all look like.
The theme is beautifully done and will enthral not just fans of mangas or even Japan. The slot had been hotly anticipated before its release and rightfully so. It’s probably not popular with players who like their slots simpler and more straightforward. In the end our only gripe was with the fact that you do need to activate the bonus bet to get anywhere.
Our rating: