Suntide Pokie Review
Microgaming appears to have gone back in time with Suntide, offering once again a modern game, but with a classic inspiration. They have quite a few of these already in their collection of 500+ titles, so I’m not sure why they would cover this theme again.
The summer theme is there, visible in the colors which are used, with the yellow and orange of the sun being present everywhere in the background. If you look at the reels though, the only influence you will see is that of the classic pub pokie. The vast majority of the symbols which are part of this game are with fruits, sevens or Bar icons on them, and that’s far from impressive when you compare the design with what the other developers are putting out these days.
Developer
Microgaming is one of the giants of the online pokie industry. The company was founded in 1996, and they were among the first to offer solutions for gaming websites, so they were pioneers when it comes to online pokie machines. With two decades of history already behind them, it’s no surprise that they have a huge collection of pokies to offer, playable both via software and online.
They have both good and bad titles in that line-up, you can’t always get it right, but generally you can expect to have a good time playing their games. For gorgeous designs, look at their latest pokie machines.
How To Play It
It’s not a difficult game to figure out, it just wasn’t built that way. Starting from the leftmost position, you have information on the money you still have to use, and then you get the Bet section, the Win display and the Autoplay and Spin buttons. The Bet section is used to modify the wager value, always covering all 9 paylines, so the part that is modified is the line bet.
I’m not especially happy about the quality of the design, but there is no question about it being simple and easy to use. You have a simple background with the orange sky and with a couple of birds flying in the distance, while on the white reels there are classic symbols for the most part.
Try Suntide Pokie Completely FREE:
Special Features
The game offers wild symbols as one of its features, and they can even expand to cover the reel they are on, but the downside is that they only show up on one reel out of the five available. You can get wild symbols on the 3rd reel of the pokie, and you can expect them to expand and take over the reel if they can be part of a winning combination. The wild does this by substituting for a missing symbol, as long as the rest of the symbols for the combo are in place already.
The other big feature which Suntide gives you is the round of free spins. Triggered with the help of its own scatter symbol, marked Free Spins, it needs to appear in 3 or more locations in order for the feature to be yours. You receive 15 free spins if it does happen, and you can retrigger them with another 3+ scatters. For the duration of the free spins, the expanding wilds can appear on the 2nd and 4th reels as well, not just on the 3rd.
Maximum Payouts
The typical 5 reel/9 payline game tries to offer better prizes than pokies with more paylines, understandable since they usually have worse features and give you fewer chances to form combinations. It’s not always the case though, and Suntide doesn’t have multipliers to improve the payouts.
Summary
I’m guessing the game was created with a certain type of player in mind, which has fun with classic pokies as well, and doesn’t mind trying them in the 5 reel format. It’s not for everyone though, and its design is far from what we’re seeing these days in most new titles.
