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Younger punters from Aoteraoa probably remember the movie Miami Vice, starring Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell. However, I will not be talking about two of them. I’m taking you back in time, to the 80s, when Sonny and Rico were played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas.
The series had five seasons but I hope that the Hotline slot machine will last much longer than that. Once you start playing the game, you will find yourselves on the streets of Miami, with a beach on one side, and hotels and neon lights on the other side.
During gameplay, you will enjoy the catchy soundtrack from the 80s, together with the sounds of police central and sirens.
The two vice cops play an important role in the TV show. Still, in the pokie machine, they are overshadowed by a mysterious lady. She leads high-paying symbols, followed by a cop that resembles Rico, and the detective that is a spitting image of Sonny.
Interestingly, only 6 regular icons are in play. Among low-value symbols, you will see a crown, necklace, and bracelet. The image of the Miami sunset represents Scatter that triggers the Free Spins feature. The expensive car is Wild which substitutes for all regular symbols.
Even though police work is quite complicated, with Hotline, everything seems as easy as breathing. The NetEnt product uses 5 reels, 3 rows, and 30 fixed paylines. To win payouts, players need to land at least 3 matching symbols on a payline. The slot pays left to right.
This is a medium-to-high volatility game that has three different RTPs, going up to 97.04%. Players can wager between $0.15 and $30 per spin. If you activate the Hotline Bonus Bet, the max bet can go up to $90. The top payout is set at 2,800x the bet, and the lady is the most lucrative icon, awarding 13.33x for 5 of a kind.
There are plenty of extras on offer in the Hotline pokie, starting with the Hotline Bonus Bet. Next, there are Wilds and Expanding Wilds, re-spins, and free spins. The sad part of the story is that players cannot retrigger the Free Spins feature.
The Hotline Bonus Bet gives you more chances to land Wilds and turn them into Expanding Wilds. A standard bet will secure you one Hotline row. Every Wild that lands on the Hotline row will expand and cover the entire reel.
If you activate the second Hotline on a different row, it will double your bet. If you want all the rows to be Hotlines, it will cost you triple the normal stake. However, when the wager goes up, so does the RTP. The standard bet comes with an RTP of 96.13%. The double bet has an RTP of 96.70%, while the triple bet offers an RTP of 97.04%.
You should take great care when selecting the number of Hotlines. The feature can suck your balance dry and leave you skint. On the other hand, it can bring loads of Expanding Wilds and re-spins. We did not have much luck with double and triple bets, so I only left one Hotline active.
Each time you land Wild on the Hotline, it will turn into Expanding Wild and cover the entire reel. You get a re-spin, with Expanding Wild locked in its position. If you land another Wild on the active Hotline during a re-spin, you will get another re-spin, this time with two Wild Reels, and so on.
As for me, I never got more than 2 Expanding Wilds in a single round. Truth be told, I have landed my fair share of Wilds on the Hotline.
Land 3 Miami Sunset Scatters, and you will get 7 free spins. All active Hotlines from the base game are also active during freebies. Each time you get Expanding Wild, it remains active until the feature ends. In theory, players can turn all reels into Wild Reels. That would secure them a 2,800x win.
In real life, it takes time to trigger free spins. I was really hacked off by the fact that I had to wait for a long time to trigger free spins. Another thing I don’t like is that only 7 free spins are available, with no chance to retrigger the feature.
I will start with the things I don’t like in the Hotline pokie machine, and that is the Free Spins feature. Maybe that was just the case with me, but I failed to enjoy this extra. First, it took too long to trigger, and second, it did not provide big wins.
However, I enjoyed plenty of re-spins with not so many Expanding Wilds in them. Also, I love the theme, being a huge fan of Miami Vice, both the TV series and the movie, myself. The NetEnt title is so popular that they decided to release a sequel.
Hotline 2 is a new-and-improved version of the original. It has all the features from the Hotline pokie, including Expanding Reels and extra free spins. The max win is also bigger, standing at 5,184x the bet per spin. As for the original game, I rate it 8.9 out of 10.
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