Has Pragmatic Play Struck Gold With The Hand of Midas?
The Hand of Midas is the latest pokie by developers Pragmatic Play. It launched on February 11 and is available in an online casino near you. Midas turned everything he touched into gold. Can the same be said about Pragmatic Play with The Hand of Midas pokie?
The Hand of Midas Fundamentals
The Hand of Midas takes place on a traditional 5×3 layout with 20 win lines. Your minimum bet is a mere $0.20 with the maximum weighing in at $100. This range of bets means everyone can try The Hand of Midas.
You need a decent-sized bankroll to enjoy the game fully, however. This is because the machine has a 96.54% RTP and very high volatility. Pragmatic Play ranks the variance of The Hand of Midas as five out of five. You have been warned.
Pragmatic Play has done a good job with the visuals. They’re bright and colourful with smooth animations. The audio isn’t as enjoyable. The background music isn’t too intrusive but some of the sound effects are annoying. Hitting a big win should have you jumping for joy. Not here because an awful alarm rings briefly, making you want to put your fingers in your ears.
The develop restricted the maximum payout from a single spin to 5,000x. This is only possible during the bonus round, which is a little disappointing.
The Hand of Midas Symbols
Having symbols related to the Midas won’t come as a shock to you considering the pokies name. Royals from ten through aces make up the lower-value symbols. They look like they’re made of stone and look pretty cool. The Hand of Midas pays between 0.10 for landing three and up to 2.50 for landing five.
Mid-tier symbols pay up to 10x if you land five treasure chests. Midas is the most lucrative symbol, awarding prizes of 2x, 6x, and 20x.
Two special symbols deserve your attention. The Wild symbols, depicted by a large W inside a broach, lands on reels 2, 3 and 4. It substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter. Each wild in the base game increases the prize multiplier by +1, +2, or +3.
A golden Midas hand is the scatter symbol. Landing three or more scatters starts the free spins round.
What Are The Bonuses and Features?
Everything revolves around the free spins feature on The Hand of Midas. You may think this is boring because almost every pokie has free spins, but this one is different.
Three scatters are required to start the free spins round. Three reels appear for each landed scatter and they spin to reveal +1, +2, or +3. The displayed numbers are added up to give you your number of free spins. A cool 45 free spins is the maximum allowed.
Wilds are sticky during the free spins round, which leads to some potentially massive prizes. Each wild increases the prize multiplier by +1, +2, or +3, again, leading the way to riches.
Pragmatic Play added a cool feature to the free spins round: guaranteed wins. The Hand of Midas guarantees a win of at least 30x from its free spins round. The feature retriggers if you don’t win at least 30x. It’s a nice feature and one more casino game developers should implement.
There is an option to purchase the free spins round, although this is extremely expensive. It costs 100x, 200x, and 300x to buy three, four, or five scatters respectively. It is our opinion to stay away from this feature if it is available where you’re playing from. The risk-reward is too high. We tested the feature using the demo machine and made a healthy profit. It is likely, however, the demo is set to payout better than the physical machine.
Conclusion
I really wanted to enjoy The Hand of Midas and let you all know how amazing it is. This isn’t the case, unfortunately. It is not a bad machine, but it feels a little too formulaic. Nothing really happens until the free spins round and while the free spins are special, they’re all this machine has in its locker.
