Magic of Sahara slot

Magic of Sahara slot by Microgaming is, like the Le Kaffe Bar game, by an in-house developer called All41 Studios. It doesn't appear to be bad at first look with gentle Middle Eastern music playing and translucent reels over some picturesque sand dunes next to a town and not at all infantile. The slot seems on par with Playtech's classic game Desert Treasure and we must hope it offers more excitement than WMS' Desert Cats which literally did make me want to be entombed in a pyramid for eternity in the hope of seeing more entertainment. So will the sands here blow us some good fortune or end up burying our bankroll for evermore?

On The Reels...

Magic of Sahara slot gives us 5 reels of 3 rows each and possibly given the 9 fixed paying lines only, has some volatility on offer. Wilds of the game Logo pay us 133x bet for 5-of-a-kind and oddly are also stacked but only on reels 3 and 4. Your 5-scatter trigger would pay 100x bet, Prince 55x, Princess 44x, Camels 27x with six card values paying either approximately 9, 6 or 4x for a full line. I say approximately because these odd figures must have some way of multiplying which would round them up, but we'll see. There are no in-play modifiers but occasionally the King may appear in one or more position and award you both a key and a card value in his place when disappearing.

Free Games

You can trigger these in two ways. Firstly you can fill all 25 key slots above the reels by accumulating the King's keys as you play, in which case you'll receive a free spin for each. You can also get 3 scatters of Jewel Baskets anywhere in view which will award you 10 free spins for 3 and in both cases you get 5 extra spins for some reason! So you will start with at least 15 spins from the trigger by scatters and 30 for the collection of 25 keys. You get two enhancements, a 2x multiplier and now the stacked Wilds may appear on all 5 reels as opposed to just 3 and 4. Now those odd pays make sense, but you cannot retrigger the spins.

Our View...

The volatility here isn't quite as high as I guessed at the start as the free games aren't hard to trigger and the base game plays well enough to keep your balance going a while. The downside to that is that the free games don't yield huge totals but there is the potential to do so with a full screen of Wilds which would pay about 2500x bet in the bonus. The soundtrack is nice to listen too with decent graphics and animations overall here, but the 95.29% RTP is on the low side for most modern video slots. Having said all that, I like the key collection as an alternative route to the free games which kept me involved and spinning to see them completed. This desert isn't as dry as it appears...