Starburst slot Review
The most popular slot machine in the history of Online Casino!
Released by NetEnt 2012 Starburst slot quickly became a huge hit! At its peak, Starburst could alone stand for 15-20% of all the gameplay in the online casinos – across all slot machines. Undoubtedly, the flagship video slot Netentertainments portfolio!
Here at G2G, you can play it for free if you want to know what all the fuzz is about before you start playing with real money at the best online casino in India.
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Why Starburst is the most popular slot game ever
There are as many theories why Starburst became such a huge success as there are players who have played the game. Some theories are definitely better than others, I’ve cherry-picked what I think are the 3 key elements to the success of Starburst:
10 pay lines and a new bonus tool
One important element for the success of Starburst is that it was NetEnt’s first 10 pay line slot.
Why is this important?
The release of Starburst slot online happened almost simultaneously as NetEnt rolled out the newly develop Free Spins Tool. A tool which allows casinos to give out free spins to their players in any NetEnt game available!
Put yourself in the shoes of an online casino for a moment, you just got this awesome new bonus tool where you can let new players try out slot machines you offer.
Starburst is a brand new game, that also happens to have a minimum bet of €0.01. Compare this to a slot machine with 20 pay line, which gives you the minimum bet of €0.02. Twice as expensive then to give free spins on Starburst!
It’s easy to see why Online casinos over the world started to include Starburst in their welcome offer, more specifically for the registration bonus.
Psychology of human nature
As all of us who have played slot machines before knows that the first slot machine, you win big on will have a special place in your heart. You will associate everything you like with gambling with this slot – that’s why it most of the times stay your favourite slot.
My first big win was on Thunderstruck 2 and it’s still today my favourite slot machine. I keep returning to it, not because it’s significantly better than any other slot machine, but because playing it I remember that wonderful feeling of my first big win!
Less is more
Lastly, but yet an important factor is the simplicity in Starburst slot machine – it’s lightyears away from the feature-filled and highly animated slots we enjoy playing today. But for someone who is unfamiliar with how a slot machine works – Starburst is a great choice for a beginner. Else what you can say about the blockbuster slot Warlords!
Starburst a rip-off?
I’ve have heard several times over the years that Starburst is a complete rip-off of Novomatics Power Stars. On one hand, It’s not to far stretched to believe the developers at NetEnt behind Starburst had played a few spins on Power stars at a land-based casino and got inspired.
On the other hand, anyone who has played both slot machines – knows that, if this was the case, Starburst is such an improved version it can’t be called a rip-off.
Of course, it’s up to each person to decide which slot is better than the other!
Starburst slot the mechanics
In Starburst you got 10 pay-lines, 5 reels, 3 rows, win both ways and one feature.
Wins both ways is one of the mechanics that make Starburst stand out. It means you can win both left-to-right and right-to-left.
Wins both ways increase the total win amount in the game compared to the traditionally left to right. As getting a 5 of a kind pay-line is now counted twice!
A Star feature!
Starburst single feature is the Star-symbol which is a Wild-symbol. A Wild symbol act as any other symbol on the reels to create the best possible winning combination. In Starburst the Wild-symbol can land on reel 2, 3 and 4.
But It’s not a normal wild-symbol. It’s an expanding Wild that stays for a free re-spin!
When the Wild-symbol lands on a reel it will expand cover the full reel and stay for additional spin.
If you are in the re-spin and another Wild symbol lands, that one will also expand and award a re-spin with both expanded wilds still on the reels.
In this game “the chase” is extremely easy for a customer to understand. Once you get one expanding wild, you know a big win is guaranteed if you manage to land one more Wild-symbol during the re-spin.
Theme & Symbols
This space-tastic themed slot that takes you far, far away from the little blue planet we call planet earth.
With the theme set in space, the graphical style of the symbols is as casino classic they can be.
Colourful Gems as low-paying symbols with two mid-symbols as a classical bar-symbol and a Seven-symbol. The high-paying symbol is, of course, the Star.
NetEnt’ uses in most of their game a colour-scheme (blue for low-value symbols and red for high-value symbols) to make it easier for us the player to differentiate which symbols pay out more in the hierarchy. But this is not the case in Starburst, this is an old game and it may be so they started with the colour-scheme after they had developed Starburst.
Besides the colour scheme, one could always look at the symbols, as more advanced the more valuable they are.
The Symbols
In Starburst there is a total of 8 symbols. Five low-paying and two mid-paying symbols As you can see from the paytable attached below:
Low-paying symbols: Colorful gems where the lowest paying symbol is the purple symbol and the blue symbol the two pay the same. Next up is the Orange symbol that is still only paying out 40 coins for a 5 pay line. Next is Green that pays out 50 followed by the yellow that pays out 60 for a pay line win. Small wins for low paying symbols!
Mid-paying symbols: It’s two mid-paying symbols in Starburst a classical 7-symbol where a 5 pay line pays out 120 coins and the bar-symbol, where a 5 pay line pays out 250! This is the symbol you are looking for on the reels!
High-paying symbol: The 8th symbol and the most graphically advanced symbol in the game is the Star that is acting as an expanding Wild Symbol. A wild-symbol act like any other symbol to create the best winning combination possible. Expanding means that when it lands on it will expand to cover the full reel. But that’s not all it will stay for a re-spin – increases your chances of a win vastly and if you are lucky one more Star-symbol lands, awarding you another re-spin, but this time you have TWO WILD REELS, one more star and you are guaranteed a SUPER MEGA WIN!
The Animations
It’s made in 2012 and the animations in the game are not comparable with today’s slot machines but it does means feel like an old video slot machine.
Small/Normal win animations: On a winning pay-line there will be small explosions on top of the symbols, to show which symbols on the reel area were a part of the winning combination.
Big Win animations: The big win animations has a resemblance to the action-bubbles in superhero comics like POW! And SMACK! But in Starburst they pop up as SUPER COMBO and MEGA WIN on the screen!
Wild symbol animation: When the Star-symbol lands and expands from 1 to 3 stars, also the reel lights up in all colours of the rainbow to emphasize it turned to a wild reel and stays for the duration of the feature.
Starburst on Mobile
Out of all the slot machines and I’ve tested several thousand on mobile, Starburst is the smallest in term of size, at only 2.3 Mb!
So why does this matter to you? Well, playing from a mobile you don’t always have a great internet connection. So a small game will load faster and play a lot better than a game that weighs more.
The small size allows Starburst to run like smooth silk, even on a bad connection like 3G. It’s also the game that supports the most devices, everything from an iPhone 4 to the iPhone X and Android phones from 2013 on-wards will let you enjoy Starburst. It’s also one of the few slot machines I’ve played that also work on a windows phone!
Starburst was NetEnt’s first online slot machine that supports playing in portrait-mode on smartphones, in addition to the traditionally landscape-mode. Which means that you can hold the phone horizontally as well as vertically to fit how you like to play.
Starburst today and in the future
NetEnt has very wisely kept the development of Starburst going without ruin the brand of Starburst. Instead of doing a Starburst 2.0 – they have looked further and added Starburst to new verticals!
Today there is more than 250 000 thousand physical Starburst machine across the globe. Starburst was the first slot to be taken online to offline due to its huge success.
NetEnt drives innovation in many areas and it’s no surprise they were among the first online suppliers to develop Starburst in VR. And thinking of it, Starburst was almost made with virtual reality in mind.
I know I for sure can’t afford space travel, but now thanks to NetEnt I can go to space and do what I love most play slot games, thanks to Starburst VR!
Play Starburst with real cash now
Starburst is undoubtedly a part of online casino history and, with oversight of animation and graphical elements which start to look slightly outdated, it’s still a slot machine that is in the same standard as new slot releases – an impressive feat by NetEnt considering it was developed in 2012.
Starburst is the ultimate beginner slot with its 10 pay-lines and simple feature. If you are a newbie – I recommend you try it at G2G for free first and then sign up on one of our recommended casinos and get some big wins in real money!