What’s Cooking is one of the Playtech games, a slot machine that is both well designed and using a theme that is not that well covered by developers. Though you will find the occasional culinary themed slot out there, many of them are around pizza or other types of foods or sweets. In this case, we’re getting more of an all rounded experience, without a focus on a certain country. The action takes place in the kitchen, the background image showing us a very busy area.
With 5 reels and 30 bet lines, What’s Cooking gives you a lot of chances each round to win a prize, helping out along the way with its wild symbols, bonus features that give you free spins and with its scatter symbols. Both a progressive jackpot and a $500,000 prize are on the line inside.
Features of What’s Cooking
What’s Cooking has both regular and special features to offer, the wildcard and the scatter being among the former, while the bonus game is in the latter category, with a delicious topic that you will enjoy going through.
Called a wildcard here, the wild symbol’s role allows it to contribute to one or more new combinations being formed, provided that it’s on a payline where a few matching symbols are already in place. If that happens, the wild provides the missing symbol and the combo may be formed or improved by it. A big advantage of the wild symbol is that it can give its own prizes as well, in case you manage to get 2 or more wildcards on the same active line. The image chosen for this symbol is that of the oven, with some black smoke coming out of it.
The proud Chef is in the scatter symbol’s image, but based on the disaster you see in some of the other symbols he’s not exactly a professional. The only thing you can expect from the scattered Chef symbols is for a prize to be awarded, taking into account the number of such symbols that are present. The minimum is three Chefs, which will get you 5x the bet. The maximum is offered for five Chefs, in which case you get 50x the bet.
Bonus Game With Free Spins
There is a second scatter symbol in What’s Cooking, represented by the symbol with the Cook Book. This scatter is reserved only for two reels though, the 1st and the 5th. Appearing on both reels during the same spin will result in the start of the bonus game.
This bonus game makes you create a sandwich, and depending on how good it is the feature will give you free spins and multipliers. Next, the free spins will start. You can get 5 to 20 spins for free from this feature and multipliers of x3.
Betting options and jackpots
Though the game is quite generous with its prizes, it also asks a lot from its player when it comes time to make a wager. The line bet can go as high as $50, with 10 coins of $5, though the starting point is only $0.01. The largest wager of the game is worth $1,500, an amount that only high rollers can afford.
With the right wager, you can take home up to $500,000. It’s the amount that the 10,000x top prize could be worth. The Dollar Bill progressive jackpot is also offered, requiring one extra dollar each spin to be activated.
Design and symbols
The design is one of the slot’s biggest advantages, even though they’re not very exact and at times they seem to veer of a bit into abstract territory. The mix of kitchen disasters and ingredients that are used for the symbols make for a fun experience, one where the Chef doesn’t come out that well, but which the player will enjoy. The kitchen is in the background image, with the reels being encased in the table that the Chef is working on.
Symbols: Cooking Stove (wild, 10,000x), Cook Book (bonus), Chef (scatter, 50x the wager), Flambe (750x), Mixer (500x), Sauce (400x), Meat (300x), Egg (250x), Onion (200x), Tomato (150x) and Lettuce (100x).
Is It Worth Playing?
Though the Chef that appears in What’s Cooking appears to be a disaster, the game is a lot of fun and it’s quite generous with its prizes and features. As a big fan of good cooking, I’ll give it the thumbs up.
The What’s Cooking slot machine is offered through the Playtech platform, so if you want to play it for real or just to practice, look out for casinos that use it.
