At the recently concluded EGR Operator Awards 2016 two video slots from Playtech were nominated for the Game of the Year award. They were Ace Ventura and Space Invaders. Neither of them went on to win the award, unfortunately. That honour went to Guns N Roses from NetEnt. This article reviews the two Playtech slots that can be played at Australian online casinos like Omni Casino and Mansion Casino.
Ace Ventura Pet Detective is a branded online pokie based on the 1994 Jim Carrey movie. Carrey plays a detective who finds lost animals. Jim Carrey dominates the reels with most of the symbols depicting the different avatars he takes in the movie. The win animations play out the most hilarious scenes from the film. Many of the gaming features in Ace Ventura Pet Detective are triggered randomly. In the Jungle Friends feature one of Carrey’s pets randomly adds wild symbols on the reels. In the Sneaky Walk feature Carrey adds stacks of wild symbols. The Loser feature may be triggered after a winless spin. You keep getting re-spins with increasing multipliers till you win. The bonus feature triggered by the rhino bonus symbols awards 7 free spins with animal modifiers. The animal modifiers can be accumulated by the player in the base game. The shark awards extra free spins; the elephant converts the online pokie from 243 paylines to 1024 paylines; the bat adds random wilds and the dove turns reel 3 into a wild multiplier.
Space Invaders online pokie resembles the arcade game of the same name that was very popular decades ago. Many of the alien symbols have been designed like the pixel icons in arcade games. The online pokie has 10 paylines with the payouts accruing both left to right and right to left. The Turn Wild feature replicates the arcade game in which you defended the planet by shooting down the invading aliens. It is triggered when the cannon randomly appears below reel 2 or reel 4, which are the unfortified reels. The cannon fires at the alien symbols on the reels and turns them into wilds. The payouts are awarded after the feature has played out with the wild symbols acting as 2x multipliers. If after any spin a UFO moving above the reels is aligned with the cannon below then the UFO Wild feature is triggered. The cannon will shoot at the UFO awarding one respin that is played with nine extra wild symbols.