Great Blue’s title refers to the big ocean and its color, one of the main focuses of this Playtech slot machine. Overall, the game’s theme seems to be about the creatures of the ocean and about all the great views one can enjoy down there. It’s quite heavy on the blue, with all sorts of fish and sea creatures among its symbols. It’s a game you will enjoy looking at, which is usually not that difficult to achieve when you have such a lovely place to use as inspiration. The marine life theme is quite common, it’s not the only slot to use it, but you will find that they did it well enough that you will not care that it’s not original.
Playtech’s Great Blue has a standard layout with 5 reels, 3 rows and 25 bet lines. As far as features are concerned, you get the usual mix of bonus games, scatters and wilds, the surprise coming from the free spins, which can have up to x15 multipliers. Even without those multipliers, the slot offers up to $500,000 for its big jackpot.
Features of Great Blue
It’s one of the games where Playtech made sure that all their bases were covered, combining the scatter symbol with the free spins and the multipliers, plus adding wild symbols that also have multipliers of their own.
The wild’s symbol has the image of the Orca Whale, which has the ability to substitute for another symbol. The presence of a wild symbol in the game insures that any potential combinations that are on the same paylines as it is will have a better chance to form. Even better, a x2 multiplier ensures that the prizes are doubled if the combo has been formed with the wild’s assistance. When the wild appears a couple of times on the same line and forms its own combination, a prize is offered by it, going from 10x to 10,000x. The only symbol that the Orca Whale Wild can’t substitute for is the scattered Pearl.
The Pearl will appear in scattered positions on the slot’s reels, giving you whatever prize it has in store based on the total number of times it is present, nothing else. There are two types of rewards you can get from it. The first one is the cash prize, which gives you 2x (two symbols) to 500x the bet (five symbols).
Bonus Game with Free Spins
There is a bonus game as well, requiring the Pearl scattered on at least three positions on the reels. In the bonus game that follows, you are taken to a screen with five shells and you have to pick two of them. You can get up to 33 spins for free and multipliers of up to x15. It’s the kind of feature I love to see in a slot machine, with potential multipliers that go beyond what 99% of the slot machines will give you.
Betting options and jackpots
It’s one of those slots where big prizes come with big betting requirements. Line bets allow for up to 10 coins of $5 each to be used, so the $50 line wagers turn into total bets of up to $1,250. The use of only one coin is allowed, just as the denomination can be reduced to only $0.01.
The best prize of the game is at 10,000x the line bet, with the cash potential going up to $500,000. Not sure if the multipliers of up to x15 from the free spins apply to this huge prize, it sounds a bit too good to be true. An even bigger prize can be won through the scatter symbol, which awards 500x the bet, or up to $625,000.
Design and symbols
The fact that it deals with sea life helps it out quite a bit. The blue is visible in every single symbol used, even the background image being the same way. It could’ve used a few ocean plants, for some extra color, but it manages to be a decent looking slot machine even without them.
Symbols: Orca Whale (wild, 10,000x), Pearl (scatter, 500x the bet), Shark (750x), Sea Turtle (750x), Coral Fish (400x), Seahorse (250x), Starfish (250x), Ace (150x), King (150x), Queen (100x), Jack (100x), 10 (100x) and 9 (100x).
Is It Worth Playing?
Ocean themed slots tend to be a lot of fun, especially when the visuals come together, and I would say that it’s the case with Great Blue. The huge prizes and enticing multipliers also help out with the slot’s attraction.
You will find Great Blue at any online casino which chooses to use software from Playtech, playable either for free or for real money.
