Game of the Week – Queen of Ice
Frozen revived the classic tale of the Ice Queen for a modern generation. Many online pokies have come out celebrating the Ice Queen since the movie’s initial release. Spinomenal recently released their own spin on the classic tale. Queen of Ice is the latest 5-Reel, 25 payline pokie. It features several features that can help you score a big win. Let’s take a look at the game and its bonus features.
Queen of Ice a Modern Spin on Classic Tale
Queen of Ice is Spinomenal’s take on the classic tale of the Ice Queen. It is set in a chilly terrain of icy mountain and features a mix of low and medium-paying symbols. The lowest paying symbols are Royals. Medium paying symbols are shards of ice, the snow owl, the white wolf, and the Ice Queen’s crown.
The Ice Queen herself is the wild for this game. It is also a paying symbol that pays out 2,000x your bet on five of a kind. Like most games of this type, you need multi-line wins to turn a profit. This game has many features to help you bulk up your winnings.
Synched Reels
During the base game, 2 random reels will be synced and identical to another reel. This is supposed to give you a better chance of winning. Sometimes it does, but often the synced reels do little to help. It would be better if they didn’t even include this feature.
Expanding Wilds
During the base game, if an Ice Queen wild partially appears in a reel, it can free the remaining rows and expand to fill the entire reel. It does not happen for every single spin, but it happens quite often.
These wilds can appear on any reel and expand on any reel. This happened quite regularly in the game and sometimes resulted in some nice wins.
Bonus Game
The Snowflake Bonus symbol is the first of two scatters. Land three of these symbols to launch the bonus game. You’ll start the game with tree spin. There is a meter on the side with multipliers from 3x to 500x. For every 5 snowflake symbols you collect, you will move up one space on the meter. You can also collect additional spins with the +1 Spin symbol.
The game continues until you run out of spins. You’ll then be awarded a prize based on the blocks filled. Unfortunately, I was never able to trigger this bonus game.
Free Spins Game
The Free Spins Snowglobe is the other scatter for this game. Get three or more of this scatter and you’ll get 10 free spins. You can also buy this feature for 50x your initial bet. For example, if you’re playing .25 per spin, you can pay $7.50 to buy the feature.
At the start of your spins, you can gamble with a flip of a coin. If you win, you get 5 additional spins. If you lose, you lose 5 spins and will only start with 5 spins. You can also opt to cash out and use your free spins. You can gamble your way up to 50 free spins.
During the free spins game, you will get random stacked wilds on your board. You can get from 1 to 3 stacked wilds.
I bought this feature several times and never got much above my initial buy-in. However, I did trigger the feature naturally and won around 45x my initial bet. That was a nice win.
Gambling for extra spins didn’t seem to benefit me. I gambled a couple of times I bought the feature and got 5 extra spins twice. The extra spins didn’t win me much.
Queen of Ice May Leave Some Players Out in the Cold
Queen of Ice is one of those online pokies that have a lot of potential but that potential will not be realized by many players. The game has a solid RTP of 95.8% but the game’s variance is a bit higher than I’d like to see. As such, some players could find themselves racking up big losses, even as smaller stakes.
The difficulty in hitting certain features attributes to this high variance and makes this game only suitable to those that don’t mind high variance games. For there average player, take Elsa’s advice and “let it go.” There are other games that can provide higher payouts and whose hit frequencies are greater.
Queen of Ice is available at Wild Card City, King Johnnie Casino, and all online casinos in Australia offering Spinomenal pokies.