Fortunium

A newly created company, Stormcraft Studios, understands just how vital it is for contemporary players to access mobile gaming. This makes it possible for the creator of the Fortunium slot to ensure that players can access it however they want, on whichever device they please. If you'd like to play from a smartphone, do it; a tablet is fine too. All that you require is some form of access to the Internet and a compatible device, with no app downloads or inconvenient software installs that you'd associate with the PC of yesteryear. You could even play the game on the 32x multicolor offered by something like a SEGA Genesis you dug out of your closet, because the slot is rigged to work on all browsers.

Bets and paylines

Of late, both NetEnt and Microgaming have focused on developing slots that sport something called a portrait layout. These rigs are 5x5 in nature and come with 5x5 paylines. This is also the case with New Fortunium, a title coming from Stormcraft Studios. This game has 40 paylines (though it's worth mentioning that both Stormcraft and the game's publisher have a history of being a bit vague about how many paylines their games actually have) and they're spread out over a rig that looks a bit like a mystery box. Insofar as we can discern a pattern here, the pattern seems to be this: paylines that are distributed over a surface that doesn't obviously have any more height or width than a standard 4x5 rig are not worth this much fuss if players don't actually win any more in a session than they do with a traditional paylines-to-bet ratio.

In Fortunium, setting your bet is a simple task requiring just a couple of clicks. To do it, you click on the white coin located right next to the playing field, and that brings up one of the most attractive features of Fortunium—its coin value adjusting system. This interface allows you pretty fine control over what amounts you're playing with, for the most part, and it gives you a nice graphical representation of that to boot. But what amounts are you really playing with, or what amounts are you even allowed to play with? You're really allowed to play with amounts that range from the minimum bet of 1$ona to a maximum bet of 187.50$Onor, which is more or less an odd sum for a maximum bet.

Symbols

With regard to the symbols, a splendid blend of spades, diamonds, hearts, and clubs meets you that is muddled together with pistols, zeppelins, and treasure chests. To make things better, two main characters greet you: Maximilian and Victoria. Their symbols are way different—they can appear stacked across all five reels. They carry colors that don't stray far from gold and brown, and in the backdrop, a city named Fortunium is hazily drawn. When you win, you are jostled by some crackling animations that show you what you really won by way of some really neat paylines. You will encounter a symbol in the form of a question mark that is always converted into a randomly selected symbol to ramp your chances of winning. All in all, the design and graphics are very simple, yet very well done. The fact that the slot has 3D effects also helps to elevate the gaming experience.

The symbols that give the least amount of winnings are the card symbols. Five clovers across the reels give you 6x your bet. Then come the diamonds, the hearts, and finally the spades, which give you 10x your bet if you roll five of those bad boys. But what about the symbols that give you the most winnings? They happen to be the two main characters of the game. Five of either the character on the left or the character on the right pays, quite handsomely, at 40x your stake. Between the two, the left character pays slightly more.

Bonus features

Fortunium includes a feature called the "win booster" that allows players to increase their chances of winning on each individual spin. To use the feature, one must increase their bet slightly to cover the cost of activating it. Therefore, the win booster can be used at only four levels: $0.20, $0.30, $0.40, and $0.50. These are, frankly, not very steep increases, especially considering the potential upside. When using the win booster, you're much less likely to see low-value symbols winning (like pay lines with low symbols that are/were commonplace in most other slots). Virtually every time you see a symbol line winning with the win booster activated, it's with a high-value symbol.

Fortunium has a classic bonus that allows you to activate free spins if you land anywhere from three to five scatter symbols on the reels. You will know them when you see them because their symbol is a green medallion set against a gleaming gold background. The scatter is capable of appearing on any or even all of the five reels, and when you hit the requisite number of them, you are awarded 10 free spins. If during the bonus round you happen to hit another scatter, you are given an extra free spin.

Summary

Fortunium fits into the category of new adventure slots, with a playing field of 5×5 squares that we think we will see much more of in the near future. This slot is not unique, but it does offer incredibly stylish 3D graphics, making it an enjoyable gaming experience. Fortunium is a high potential slot where you can win a whopping 800x your bet. However, this means that you play with the highest bet and fill the entire playing field with wilds, something that you have more opportunity to do in the free spins mode, where you have one to three reels covered with Mystery wins. The win Booster feature is very useful and worth the extra you need to wager per spin, especially since it removes the low-stacked symbols.

Fortunium has a bit of a negative side: You can experience long stretches of time where you don't win anything at all. You may also be waiting a long, long time for the free spins to kick in. Seen this way, the game is really for players who have a lot of patience and prefer to win less frequently but in larger amounts than to win more often and in smaller amounts. A new and untested company in the casino sector, Stormcraft has nevertheless caught the industry's attention because they work with Microgaming. This affiliation means that the slots they create will appear in the same online casinos as Microgaming's own products, and since we rate Microgaming very highly as a supplier, this bodes well for the eventual quality of Stormcraft's games. Considering that this is their first ever slot machine, Fortunium truly dazzles with its opportunities for winning and for its bonus features.