Astro Slots

It's been a while since we got hooked on a real slot machine. The ones that usually do the trick have £100 jackpots. After all, what's the point in winning a fiver you know you'll put straight back in?

Perhaps we've missed the point though and there are people who play slot machines because they genuinely enjoy watching spinning reels. In fact, we hope we've missed the point because only these types of people are going to find any fun in Astro Slots, as there's no real money involved and nothing in the way of skill is required. Actually there's very little game here at all.

That said, using our relatively limited knowledge of slot machines, initially we found Astro Slots baffling to play. The virtual machine features five reels and five win lines but it was never entirely clear which combination of the space-themed planets and rockets needed to be where in order to win.

When a line - horizontal or diagonal - does appear, the amount of money this wins you is clocked up at the top of the screen. Meanwhile, a light flashes between five different bonuses which determine whether this amount is banked or lost.

Land on the bottom icon and you lose the money, or there's another which doubles it. There are also Nudge and Hold bonuses and these can potentially let you increase the win. However, nudging also had us confused due to the way the reels sometimes seemed to nudge one way, then the other. Only certain random reels can be nudged anyway - often it's not the ones you want to move. At least holding was more straightforward.

The final top icon takes you to the Black Hole screen and this is where the big money is won. Instead of the odd $5, it offers wins nearer to $40. We'd like to say this bit of the game is as interesting as it looks and sounds but really you just wait until a light comes to a halt on an amount that you then win.

We'd also like to think playing a slot machine well requires a little bit of skill, but Astro Slots doesn't call for any. Hitting a button to activate a nudge is more a case of hoping for the best. There's no screen to tell you which formations win the most money or any way of stopping lights on the bonuses you want either so it's even more random than we would have thought.

On that basis, in our first game we were broke and it was game over within a minute. Our next game has been going for about a day now - we just keep winning money. Your highest credit scrolls across the top of the menu but there's no high score table and no way of just cashing in your money and leaving the game. Just keep rolling then.

On one positive note, Astro Slots does look colourful, and while at the start we didn't get much out of watching reels spinning, the spinning became quite hypnotic after awhile. Maybe it's just because we ended up playing the game for far longer than is healthy in an attempt to try and work out if there was anything we were missing. But sadly there wasn't.

Good for half an hour's play then but there's no reason to keep on playing Astro Slots after that.