I meant to post about this horror show of a slot last week but I forgot, so I'll do it now
First off I should state upfront that this slot bust me out when I was in a massively EV+ position, so I'm ill-disposed towards it for that reason, but it's still a shit slot. (I took the periodic 200% up to £20 offer that 32Red send me, hit a juicy win on Bust Da Bank (which I really like) and moved over to Dr Watts with a £130 bankroll and about £500 to wager, and ended up busting out, I asked 32Red for my stats, my RTP on Dr Watts was 80.6% over the best part of 4000 spins.)
Anyway, the main Dr Watts three scatters bonus round is capped at 35x stake as far as I can tell, I hit it plenty of times and never once did I get an offer better than 35x, now I can't say for sure if there's a bigger win than that in there
because the paytable doesn't actually tell you what the possible pays are. You'd think with it paying so badly it'd turn up very regularly, but I went several hundred spins on more than one occasion without seeing it. This round can only be triggered by three scatters as the symbols themselves are only on reels 1, 3 and 5 - this is significant.
The other problem is with the other bonus round, which is the free spins round. This is triggered by three, four or five scatters with the free spins symbol. More scatters equal a bigger triggering pay and more spins in the round itself. (Five scatters is a pretty decent pay.) The round itself turns one full reel wild per spin for 15-25 spins, but there's no multiplier going on or anything like that, and the reels seem to be the same as the base game, no stacked wilds or suchlike or special symbols.
The absolute clanger that MG have dropped with this free spins bonus round IMO is that the single wild reel does NOT substitute for the Dr Watts three scatters bonus symbol, or the free spins scatters symbol.
So then, let's say the wild reel is reel 1, 3 or 5 on a free spin, (it chooses the wild reel before the spin itself), you IMMEDIATELY KNOW that it's impossible to get the Dr Watts bonus round because his symbol only appears on 1-3-5 and the wild reel doesn't substitute for it, so as soon as you see reel 1, 3 or 5 go wild you know you can't get the Dr Watts bonus before any of the reels have even stopped spinning. Of course the slot will happily drop the scatter symbol onto either of the other two reels it can appear on, effectively blocking a stop on that reel with a useless symbol. This happens ALL THE TIME and it's really annoying.
And there's a very similar problem with the free spins scatter symbols as well, because the wild reel doesn't substitute for that either, so it's literally impossible to get five free spins scatters during free spins themselves, so that pay is impossible to achieve during free spins, 'cause you've always got one reel wild, and whilst the pay for five scatters is pretty good, the pay for four scatters is far less so.
What this means in practice is that during free spins, TIME AND TIME AGAIN, you will see chunks of the reels cluttered up with useless fucking Dr Watts scatter symbols and free spins scatter symbols that can literally pay nothing in the case of the Dr Watts symbols, or are 'capped' at four scatters in the case of the free spins symbols.
It's a mystifying design decision, insofar as MG appear to have explicitly designed a bonus round that 'blocks' itself all the time, and when you add in the fact that there are no stacked wilds on this slot at all, and even the top 5OAKs are very uninspiring, you end up wondering where the hell the pays are going to come from.
I did try and work out what the 'best' combination in free spins would work out at, with the single wild reel, a wild symbol on the other four reels, and whatever other pays that would make, and it didn't seem to add up to much, about 1000x stake or something like that, plus it'd be an incredibly rare hit too. In reality you're doing incredibly well to hit 100x stake on the bonus round, and the pays in the base game are just laughable.
I'd peg this slot as low variance, and it's absolutely fucking dire too - will never play again. Looks and sounds great, but the cack-handed design leaves it dead in the water - I honestly don't think they finished it off properly, or play-tested it properly.
Total shovelware.
) .
A short time later, whilst I was still getting over being annoyed by the super lame 0.10 win, I triggered my second feature, and again went with Sofia. The first 12 spins were dead, but on spin 13, Sofia came through with the goods big time. The entire screen lit up with Playboy symbols, to my amazement. I couldn't believe it, as I knew that getting any more than three wilds would itself be a mission. Watching the credits roll over to 486000 was somewhat of a surreal experience. There was absolutely no indication or feeling preceding this win that I was in for something nice, let alone a max win for the stake placed. I was caught completely off guard, and I really thought my luck was dead for the night. So in the end, an amazing outcome for me.
