Wild Orient Slot
Wild Orient is a 5-reel, 243 'all ways pay' online slot from Microgaming. Microgaming have been on something of an Eastern kick of late. This is yet another Asian-themed slot released by them in late 2015/early 2016. It follows on from such titles as 'Win Sum Dim Sum', 'Lucky Twins' and 'Lucky Zodiac'. We could be cynical and say that this allows Microgaming to be lazy and use the same graphics time and time again, but we're not going to. We're also not going to mention that the 'giant panda' symbol used here is exactly the same as used in their 'Untamed Giant Panda' slot. Perhaps Microgaming need to buck their ideas up a bit – after all they are perfectly capable of producing brilliant new slots such as 'Hot as Hades'.
Anyhow, the symbols here are all based on 'Eastern nature' – a heron, a monkey, the afore-mentioned giant panda, a tiger and an indian elephant. We can't say that the images used are the best we've ever seen. Joining the oriental critters on the reels are the standard 'Microgaming Eastern-themed' playing card symbols nine through to ace. This is an 'all ways pay' slot, so all 243 possible pay lines are in play at all time. You simply pay one fixed fee to spin the reels. The minimum is 0.25, and the fee amounts rise in multiples of 0.25. In essence, you are paying one-twenty-fifth of the fee as your coin size. When you're ready to play, hit the spin button.
Payout & bonus rounds
Payouts commence at double your coin size for three nines or three tens. The biggest (in more ways than one) prize-giver is the elephant symbol, five of which will win you 4,000x the size of your coin.
The 'Wild Orient' symbol is the wild symbol in this game. It substitutes for all other symbols except the scatter symbol, and only appears on reels two and four.
A stone carving of an elephant (accompanied by carvings of all the other critters) acts as the scatter symbol in this game. You can win a payout by landing just two scatters anywhere on the reels, but if you land at least three you win fifteen free spins. All free spin wins are tripled, and free spins can be re-triggered.
This game does have one very unique feature. At the end of each spin, you can choose to re-spin any of the five reels. The cost of each 're-spin' is indicated at the bottom of each individual reel. You can re-spin the reels individually as many times as you want until you re-spin all five for your normal fee.
Unlike the animals in this game, we have to conclude that this slot is really quite tame. It's time, we think, for Microgaming to stop re-using imagery and gameplay and start to come up with truly different, innovative slots, just like their rivals NetEnt do. There's really nothing to get excited about here, and the single re-spin feature doesn't ever seem to be to the player's advantage. In short, more than a bit of a disappointment.