White King II

Humans like cats. Humans are fascinated by big cats, like lions. And when those big lions have something unique, our interest also grows more. There’s no more proof to this than white lions whose fur is not a regular yellow one, but a snowy white, caused by a recessive trait in the gene, although it remains distinct from the albinism proper. These white lions are believed to be native to the Timbavati region of South Africa and the locals believed them to be divine creatures. So if there was ever a choice of lion royalty, they’d be our first pick – and it seems Playtech agrees, because these rare felines are the poster boys for White King II. The slot is played on a 5×3 playing field with 40 flexible paylines allowing gamblers to turn them on or off to fine-tune their bet. The slot also has some bonuses – the first is the ever familiar, if a bit boring free spins feature that can reward up to 50 extra turns. The second and far more prominent is the presence of double symbols, effectively doubling all symbols and all rewards.

The graphics are quite decent for the occasion, but they’re not even close to the best we’ve seen from Playtech. Compared to Call of the Valkyries, it lacks those all important touches that show there’s been a serious desire by artists to really make the title shine brighter. There’s no cool visual effect in the foreground, the backdrop is a boring, static image, though it’s a cool throwback to the first game to bear the White King name. The animations are nothing fancy either. The best way we would describe the graphics for this title is average.

But visuals don’t make or break a title, that honour belongs to gameplay. In some ways, we quite like what Playtech had tried to do. The developer gave us double symbols, and made it work nicely, allowing for some awesome wins to come out of the whole thing, as symbols can reach massive ten-of-a-kind wins. Naturally, things are balanced with that in mind, but between double icons and forty reels, people won’t be getting bored any time soon. With a free spins bonus on top of that, we’re quite fond of it.

Thanks to the flexible paylines, your wager can be as little as $0.01 up to $400 per spin. Naturally, lowering your active paylines is unadvisable as you would leave yourself with less winning chance and the temptation of a 5,000x your stake is great enough to dissuade people from lowering their paylines unless they absolutely have to. It’s here, however, that we run into a major red flag and that’s the absence of any known RTP. While the pays are great and gameplay enjoyable, without RTP information, we don’t know how likely you are to win your money back, which is a huge issue, obviously.

Our feelings on the symbols themselves are somewhat mixed, though mostly negative. While having the male, female and cub white lion makes sense, the presence of the eagle is less explainable. The rest of the icons are playing card symbols – 9,10, J, Q, K and A. There’s also the fact that, with double symbols, the icons can be too small to really get a good look at, especially on mobile devices.

And while we’d like to go into a lot of detail about double symbols, the feature is rather clearly explained in those two words. The free spins are exactly what’d you’d expect – the real advantage comes from being able to activate fifty free spins, as well as having the chance to keep retriggering the bonus over and over if you have some sort of insane luck.