Why not combine two of the most popular themes in online slot machines—fishing and Ancient Egypt? If you’ve ever been curious about the possible results of such a merger, your curiosity is now satiated. Fish Eye is a hybrid of two iGaming staples created by Pragmatic Play and their partners at Reel Kingdom. If you’re having trouble suspending your disbelief, just think of the ancient Egyptian towns of Canopus or Thonis-Heracleion, which were once great metropolises before being swept away by natural disasters like tsunamis and floods. They have been lowered to the sea floor, where the gloomy underwater illumination adds to the strange feel of Ancient Egyptian culture.
Players may try out all that Fish Eye has to offer by venturing into a submerged area. One of the first things that caught my eye was the row of fish above the gaming grid, which consisted of five reels and three rows. There are two bubbling water areas, one on each side of the screen, in which sculptures either rest in the sand or bob on the surface. At first, I didn’t see the fish at all, and Fish Eye seemed like any other Ancient Egyptian-themed slot, although one with a lot more water than is typical.
Fish Eye may be opened like a tomb by prying at its secret lid to uncover a very erratic mathematical model that can produce a maximum return to player value of 96.07%. When utilizing the Ante wager, purchasing free spins, or placing a single wager between 10 pence and £/€250, this value will be applied. When activated, the Ante Bet doubles the current wager and adds an additional scatter symbol to each spin. The 5×3 game grid has a total of 10 paylines for landing winning combinations of up to five of a kind.
If you get a whole payline of 10, J, Q, K, or A low payouts, you’ll get back between 5 and 10 times your wager. If you get a full payline of eye, cat, bird, or scarab golden goods, you’ll get back between 50 and 200 times your wager. Fish Eye does not make use of wild symbols, thus they cannot aid players in any way. However, the game does make use of Fish Money symbols, scatters, Collectors, and Removers, all of which will be discussed in the next section.
Eye of the Fish: Slot Functions
The first symbols to appear are fish representing money, with values chosen at random. The default values range from 0.1x to 0.5x the bet to 1x, 2x, 5x, 10x, 50x, or 100x the wager. When you get four or more Fish Money icons in the main game, you win that amount. When 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15 Fish Money symbols appear, the total bet is multiplied by 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 500, 1,500, or 2,000, respectively. A horizontal bar at the top of the screen represents the current multiplier.
No Risk Turns
When 3–5 scatters appear, players receive 10, 15, or 20 bonus spins, respectively. When you enter the free spins bonus round, the collection mechanism shifts and the multipliers vanish. New payouts for landing Fish Symbols are 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100, 200, 500, and 1,000 times the wager. Fish Money values are granted when a Collector symbol lands at the same time as a Fish Money sign. Every four acquired collectors trigger an additional ten free games.
The Remover is another special symbol that only appears in the bonus game. When a Remover is activated, the Fish Symbol with the lowest potential value is destroyed. One more free spin is awarded for hitting a Remover, and three additional free spins are awarded for hitting two Removers at once. At random times, such as when Collector symbols appear but no fish appear at the conclusion of a spin. There’s a chance that fish symbols may occur on the reels.
Finally, if the Buy Free Spins button is there, players can use it to get access to the bonus round. If you happen to get 3, 4, or 5 scatters, you’ll have to pay 100 times your wager.
Judgment from a Fish’s Eye View
Given the popularity of both fishing and Ancient Egypt in online slots, it was almost inevitable that the two themes would eventually collide. It was astonishing to see them all in one spot, even if it wasn’t entirely unexpected to learn that Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom were responsible. The studios are widely recognized as the creators of Big Bass Bonanza and other similarly successful fishing-themed slot machine games. Therefore, the studio team is in a great position to take a risk and try something new.
Fish Eye, the product of these trials, is not without its fair share of additives. There is, however, a recognizable game process at the center of this mayhem. To win Fish Money, you must either get a lot of them during the main game or get Collectors and Fish Money symbols during the free games. Fish Eye’s design is interesting in that it makes the main game and the free spins round about equal in quality. Free spins replace the multiplier with a simple collecting symbol function, and the lowest money value removals are treated as a little sketchy version of the Eye of Horus, while the normal game features multipliers with gigantic values at the high end. Fish Eye is a game that offers a range of fish-themed dishes, much like a meze, with the last course being a win cap of 10,000 times the wager. This is a whole new level compared to the rest of the Big Bass series, with only Big Bass Bonanza Keeping it Reel coming close.
When it comes to unconventional subject matter, Reel Kingdom is at home. Some examples are the Cash Elevator, the Star Pirates Code, and the Snake Eyes on Snakes and Ladders. It may be argued that Fish Eyes makes sense while being radically unusual, and that, like dipping fries into a shake, it ought to simply kind of work in the proper hands.