The Phantom Slot Machines

The
Phantom slots game is based on the popular comic strip character originally
developed in the 1930s. It has all the features slot players have come to
expect from Aristocrat. The game has a side wager (called a “bonus bet”)
that’s required if you want to get the biggest payouts, its bonus round
system is a complicated (but beautifully-designed), and the theme of the
game is consistent throughout all the machine’s features. Since Aristocrat
began releasing a long line of licensed-character slot machines, The Phantom
may be one of their strangest choices to base a slot game on.

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The Phantom started out as a weekly comic strip in December of 1939. At that
time, the serial comic industry was still big business. At the peak of its
readership, The Phantom had over 100 million fans that would skip right to
the comics section of the newspaper to find out about his latest adventures.
The character himself is a warrior in the fictional country of Bangalia. His
trademark purple body suit and the skull symbol that often represents the
character are ever-present in the game’s animations and on its case. But
Phantom’s popularity is not what it once was; a planned film reboot is all
but dead, a hint that today’s movie fans aren’t interested in this
particular classic comic character.

That’s why it’s a bit weird that Aristocrat went forward with their The
Phantom video slot. The game isn’t lacking in features, the quality of the
visuals and sound effects are on par with other slots, and the bonus round
will draw in plenty of slot gamblers who may not even know the origin of the
character. Though The Phantom is still in publication, and is one of the
last remaining action adventure comics from a golden era, it doesn’t have
the star appeal that Jaws or Mission:Impossible have.

The Game’s Basics

This game is a five-reel twenty-five line slot game that requires a five
credit ante bet to play the bonus round. The Phantom slot uses stacked wild
symbols and stacked scatter symbols, which areeasy ways to increase your
free spin amounts and bonus cash. If you’ve placed the five-credit side
wager, you’ll need to spin six scatter symbols anywhere on the screen to
trigger the game’s bonus.

The maximum bet for this machine is twenty-five credits, and the credit size
ranges from $0.01 all the way up to $2. Betting maximum credits and placing
the side wager ante of five additional credits at max bet size will set you
back anywhere from $0.30 to $60, giving gamblers with all different sizes of
budgets the ability to play along as The Man Who Cannot Die.

The scatter symbols are important in this video slot for two reasons: first,
they trigger the bonus round. Second, if you land three or more of them,
you’ll automatically win free spins. Three or more scatters will pay out ten
free spins, or fifteen spins if you have activated the side bet. Scatter
symbols also add extra reels to your spins – if you land three scatters, two
sets of reels are added, while landing nine scatter will extend the game to
three sets of extra reels, fourteen scatters add an additional four reels,
and thirty symbol will activate a Wild Fist bonus that turns most of the
symbols on those third, fourth and fifth bonus reels into wilds until you
run out of free spins.

The Bonus Game

This slot’s bonus game is more than a little confusing, but if you
understand the way it works before you play you’ll have no trouble with it.
The game doesn’t have a special name or a particular tie-in to the mythos of
the original story – when you line up a specific set of game symbols on any
active line, your screen splits into four. It’s important to point out that
you won’t get into this bonus round if you don’t place the additional five
credit side wager.

In the bonus game, you’re asked to pick from one of the four screens, trying
to guess which will have the biggest number of scatter wins. You will only
win the credit amount on the screen you’ve chosen, unless you’ve picked the
screen with the most scatter wins of all four screens. In that case, you get
the bonus payout for all four rounds combined.

Aristocrat has added a little complexity to their standard lineup of
licensed video slots – the bonus game on Phantom slot machines can be hard
to figure out at first, even with in-game instructions. But complexity in a
slot is almost always a good thing for one-armed bandit gamblers.
Aristocrat’s Phantom was a big hit when it was released in 2011 in
Australia, and the game continues to be popular as it moves around the
world.