Jumbo Joker

Oftentimes, three-reel slots are relegated the duty of more simplistic gameplay. We’ve seen an explosion in complexity in five-reel games as developers compete with each other in what different variations they can draw in new customers and get them to spend their cash with them rather than a rival company. By proxy, three-reel slots have been left behind, but every so often, you see something that breaks up the monotony of it all. Jumbo Joker is a Betsoft’s release and aims to pull in players by giving them not one, but two different reel sets to play on. Allowing gamblers to try it for as little as $0.02 each spin on only one payline and incentivising you to play for $0.20 per spin on all five paylines, the game provides you with a higher chance of reaching for the upper reels with a higher minimum wager and bigger rewards. That’s how the slot constantly tests you whether you’re willing to call it quits or risk more for a bigger score.

As far as graphics go, Jumbo Joker is really rather barren. For one reason or another, three-reel games have always stuck to the appearance of their old physical counterparts and Betsoft seems to have stuck to tradition, as well. Regardless, we quite like how it lights up or dims down depending on what’s active and what isn’t, making sure your attention is always focused on the important bits. Still, on your first time around, you could miss some important details – like the fact when you switch onto the upper reel, unless you manually scale down how much you want to bet on it, the slot will always include your full win for a single spin instead of breaking it up into several.
The reason it does this, we imagine, is to incentivise you to bet bigger and expand into bonuses. After all, it’s relatively easy to persuade people to keep going after they already won something. Even with the biggest bet, you can at max only bet $10, and everything beyond that is a choice between collecting your win, or to keep going in hopes of scoring something juicy from the upper reels. But unlike the first time around, where the incentive is additional paylines, now it tempts you to play bigger by increasing how much you win, and adding stacked symbols on either just the middle, or all three reels. It’s a very well designed system that sucked us up for ages, and it’s a dastardly smart way to drag you away from collecting. But just in case you’re a really lucky person, you can only spin up to 15 times before Jumbo Joker says the fun is over. Spoilsports.

With this sort of system, it’s relatively easy to see just how difficult it is to really pin how well this Betsoft release really pays. Mainly because it will vary so much from person to person and how each gambler plays. If you like taking risks and invest every win into pushing higher, you’ll likely end up playing a low to medium variance game in which you may have some luck. At other times, it can reach cutthroat levels of high variance, where you’re deep in the red, and pull off a miracle that brings you back, and even nets you a profit. This sort of wide range is awesome, and it rewards risk takers, just as much as it teaches you to be careful.

Because classic slots have an obsession with appearing like physical machines, it’s no surprise that the most stereotypical icons you associate with physical games also make an appearance. Fruits, bells, treasure chests and, of course, mischievous jokers – they all dance around, just waiting for the right opportunity to be part of a win. There’s not much in terms of fancy animations here, so people looking for a visual treat might have to look elsewhere.
The same can be said for people who want free spins or some other bonus to vary things up. Jumbo Joker wears what it is proudly on its sleeve, and the clear lack of special features is proof of that.