Wings of Riches slot review (Netent)

With Wings of Riches, Netent closes a disappointing 2019 on a low note

 

The year 2019 won’t go down into the books as the best Netent year ever. Far from it, the share price keeps falling, the turnover is disappointing, and they are no longer the undisputed number one online slot provider.

Many of their new slots were clearly underperforming.

Sure, Dead or Alive 2, Ozzy Osbourne and Reel Rush 2 were solid releases, but for the most part, many new Netent slots in 2019 were mediocre bland releases.

Just think of Butterfly Staxx 2, a release that nobody was waiting for.

As far as we’re concerned, Wings of Riches is the worst Netent slot of 2019. The video slot looks undeniably beautiful but has a significant flaw: it’s boring to play from here until eternity and back.

Mystery wilds (and the accompanying, excruciatingly slow animation) appear about every 3 to 4 spins and rarely yield good results.

As you can’t speed up the mystery wild feature animations, all you can do is wait and get increasingly annoyed.

When a player hopes a mini-bonus feature does NOT drop, something is off.

Wings of Riches gameplay and features

Wings of Riches is set in a fairytale forest populated by colourful elves and beetles.

The game has 5 reels with 3 rows of symbols and 20 fixed paylines. Bets start at $€ 0.20 per spin and go up to a hefty $€ 400 per spin.

The variance is undeniably low: the hit frequency is very high, which means payouts must be meagre.

You can win up to 400 x the bet per spin, and even that will hardly ever happen.

One advantage of Wings of Riches, however, is the high theoretical payout rate of 96.63%. With such a Return to Player, this slot falls short of our top 10 best paying online slots, but it’s impressive nonetheless.

Symbols and payouts

The four fairies are the premium symbols of the game and payout the most. Each 5-of-a-kind on an active payline nets you between 25 x and 75 x the total bet.

The three beetles are the medium-paying symbols: they earn you between 5 x and 7.5 x the total bet for five identical symbols.

And then there are the three colourful flowers: the low symbols. Spin 5 identical ones, and you make between 1.25 x and 3.75 x the bet.

The Dandelion is the wild symbol and replaces all other symbols except the scatters.

Mystery wild feature

Every time (and that’s often!), a dandelion hits the reels; it causes 2 to 4 mystery wilds to appear.

This feature only comes to life whenever more than one dandelion appears on the reels, so you can now get multiple mystery wilds.

Free spins bonus

3, 4 or 5 scatters will activate the free spins bonus of 10 free spins. Extra scatters don’t lead to extra free spins – lo and behold, Netent having to make it a bit more interesting for us, the players.

During the free spins, the Mystery Wild feature is active again, and you can earn extra multipliers up to x 5.

And…that’s it!?

Rarely have we seen a free spins bonus that is the spitting image of the base game. Again, it looks like Netent made a sport out of dumbing down this slot to make it as dull as possible.

Our verdict on Wings of Riches

We get that not every slot player is equal and that, as a slot provider, you can’t please everyone.

But even with that in mind, we can’t help but conclude that this slot is just a waste of everyone’s time, Netent’s and ours.

The gameplay is boring and monotonous, the bonus features are uninspired and drop far too often, and it’s almost impossible to win big on this slot.

This Netent monstrosity of a slot does not deserve the light of day. If they want to stand their ground in the cutthroat competition between slot providers, they have to shape up in a big way, or it might be the end of them.

2 out of 5 stars

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