Enter the land of fairytales in Magic Mirror
This won’t be the most beautiful or feature-rich slot you’ll play all year. But if you get two or three Expanding Reels during the free games, you really won’t care less about its design or that the graphics aren’t a work of art.
Find out why this mirror is Magic!
There’s no formal way for deciding on who previews which Reel Relics slot. Sometimes I draw lots, other times someone asks to preview a particular slot because they know it and like it. On other occasions, there’s a consensus that a particular member of the team should be the one doing that review. And that was certainly the case with the Magic Mirror slot.
Now, I’m not saying Andreas is a vain person. All I’m saying is that I gave him the nickname ‘Chocolate’. Because if he could eat himself, he would.
I’m also a little bit suspicious as to why he carries a little mirror around with him all day. He says it’s to check on a rare skin condition he has but his skin looks just fine to us. Besides, he’s always arranging his hair when he uses the mirror, not checking up on his alleged skin condition. Either way, we felt the Magic Mirror mobile slot was right up his street, all things considered.
It’s a video slot with a Jackpot, albeit not a Progressive one. You can win up to 100,000 INRs on it as I’ll find out in a bit.
Magic Mirror slot is the first I’ve seen of Merkur
The Magic Mirror mobile slot is made by the German company Merkur. Don’t punish yourself too much by eating Brussel sprouts or watching re-runs of Joey if you’d never heard of Merkur before. This is the first-ever online slot of theirs I’ve reviewed for G2G so they’re not exactly NetEnt or Microgaming in terms of video slots stardom just yet.
From Land-based to Online
But what they are is an incredibly experienced company when it comes to making gambling-related products, albeit offline ones. After all, the company’s founder Paul Gauselmann started making betting arcades and land-based slot machines way back in 1957. They took their time in going online and from the little I’ve seen of their slots, they’re pretty creative and original. So I hope to be seeing more from them over the next few months.
Which is more than I can say about Gordon Ramsey. It’s now going on 15 years that I’ve seen him get angry every time he’s on TV. And 15 years since I’ve seen him cook something.
The theme of the slot is magic/fantasy/fairytales. Not being based on a particular story, unlike say, Hansel and Gretel, I can only guess at what the actual storyline is but I guess a sort of Snow White if the eponymous magic mirror is anything to go by. If this fairytale-style sounds like your cup of tea (personally, I like Darjeeling) then you might want to give Reel Relics slot Prissy Princess a go. It’s more fun than a stag-do in Vegas with Charlie Sheen for company.
Graphic Designer on a first warning
Apparently, Merkur employs over 8,000 members of staff. But whatever they’re paying the Graphic Designers and symbols illustrators, it probably isn’t much. From an aesthetic point of view, this slot really isn’t going to win any awards. It’s all pretty basic stuff that looks more like the art of a decent Art A-Level student than a sharp hairstyled, French Connection t-shier whizzkid of a Designer.
There are the tried and tested card symbols, some sort of Princess in a green dress, a Unicorn (obviously), a ring and a book with a beautiful leather cover that looks like it could contain some very powerful secrets. I’m not saying it does. I’m just saying that it looks that way.
Then there’s the Scatter, unsurprisingly the Magic Mirror itself with a golden Lionhead just above it. And herein lies part of the problem with this mobile game. Because in the Magic Mirror slot, the Scatter is also the Wild. Why is that a problem? Well, obviously because it means that it will only appear now and then and if it doesn’t appear, you’re deprived of opportunities in two regards.
- Wins helped out by the Wild.
- 2. Activating the bonus feature (see below).
The norm is for there to be a Wild and a Scatter (or an alternative way of activating bonus rounds) so you can get lucky with one symbol or the other. This, therefore, becomes a somewhat enforced case of putting all your eggs in one basket. Which in turn makes it quite a volatile slot.
Nothing much to report in terms of audio. You can hear the reels fall into place with each spin and a different sound when you have a win. But that’s as standards to slots as a vanilla flavour is to ice cream.
Expanding Wilds in free games feature saves the day
How to play the Magic Mirror slot is pretty easy because as you will have guessed by now, it’s not feature-rich.
Free games
This game is all about free games. Three of those Scatter symbols will activate them and you get 10 of them. You’ll only ever a get a maximum of three Scatters meaning a maximum of 10 free games. What some players may find a little disappointing is that activating the free games doesn’t get you an instant cash win, much less one with a multiplier. Meaning you start the 10 free games with 0 money won and theoretically, you could end up with 0 money won…after the 10 free games.
But every cloud has a silver lining and the one here is that one of the game’s regular symbols will be randomly selected to be your featured symbol for the duration of the free games. What that means is that if you get a win using the special symbol, it will expand to cover the whole reel. If you’re lucky enough to get two or three, you could be looking forward to a big in subsequent spins. If you manage to cover all the reels with one symbol, well that’s where you could secure yourself the Jackpot.
The special symbol that can become an expanding symbol is a feature that Play’n Go quite like and one I’ve seen before in the likes of Book of Dead.
Gamble Feature(s)
Lots of slots have a gamble feature that allow you to double up on any win by picking either red or black. This one has it, too. And as is often the case, you can see which were all of the previous cards that have come up in the last six times the gamble was activated. You can keep doubling up, up to a maximum of 1 400 Rupees.
But here where things get interesting. There’s a second way of gambling. There’s a sort of staircase with different amounts on it. Rather than picking red or black, you have to stop the flashing light on the monetary amount rather than the 0 (where you lose everything).
Each time you manage this, you’ll go up a level to the net monetary amount but remember that one mistake and you lose the lot. It’s a feature we can’t remember having seen anywhere before.
It’s a ‘pass’ but Merkur must do better
It’s hard to know what to make of this mobile slot. Let’s start with the negatives. It’s not particularly well-designed, there’s no real background to the theme offered and the symbol that acts as both Scatter and Wild is…well, a little beat ‘cheapskate.’
That said, I’ll just about give it a “Pass’ because I like the main free games feature. Or rather, I like the special symbol that can become an Expanding Wild. There’s obviously a lot of potential there to secure huge wins if you start getting more Expanding reels than non-Expanding ones.
There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the second Gamble feature. It’s hard to tell whether it makes any difference or not to your chances of winning when you hit the button.
But credit to Merkur for at least doing something original.
To play Magic Mirror for real money, you’ll need to open an account at one of the best Indian casinos. Its’ quick, easy and simple. In other words, the opposite of those self-service checkouts at supermarkets that take longer than when you just have a ‘human’ cashier working there.