5 Reel Drive Slot – Free Demo

Doughnuts at the bottom, a flaming wheel at the top

Games Global has an aged entry to its lineup of pared-back, feature-free slots, and a rundown might appear almost superfluous at this point. It runs five reels, three rows and nine paylines, and nothing is bolted on behind them. If you have played one, you have sort of played them all. The difference here is a winding-road sign that acts as the wild and a police car that pays as a scatter. No matter. It's time to top up the tank and venture back out onto the open road one more time. I put 450.00 through it in one sitting.

As far as these no-frills slots go, the visuals are about what you would anticipate from 2008, and this 5 reel, 9 payline video slot is situated on the highway, packed with road signs and police cars. Symbols are plainly drawn. The paytable's low end is food: doughnut and coffee, blueberry pie, drink and hot dog, fries, burger. They have none of the contemporary sharpness that comes with a high resolution, and they will seem familiar, as they are almost all the same as those employed in a hundred other driving games. Above the food sit the dice and the three drivers, pink car, yellow car and truck, in that order up the table. At the pay table's less thrilling end are the low-value fillers, while the upper end is crowned by the flaming wheel with the chequered flag, which pays out 2,500.00 for five of a kind. That figure needs the wheel on all five reels, on one of the nine lines.

How the road sign and the police car behave

5 Reel Drive's features total a wild and a scatter, and that is it. Both of them work in the base game, and neither one starts anything. The most valuable symbol in the game is the flaming wheel with the chequered flag, and the winding-road sign is the game's wild symbol. It will stand in for any other symbol from the paytable except the scatter. Mid-session, with the credit meter reading 1,988.75, I had the yellow winding-road sign on the bottom row of reel two and the police car on the bottom row of reel five, both special symbols on the grid at once, and the middle reels paid 5.25 for it.

The police car is the scatter, and it pays 11.25, 45.00 and 112.50 for 3, 4 and 5 of a kind, from any spot on the reels. Because it pays from anywhere, a scatter win does not have to land on a payline at all. Those scatter wins are added to the payline wins and multiplied by the total credits staked. A single spin can therefore return a line win and a scatter win together. There are no free spins, no bonus round and no gamble. Nothing carries from one spin into the next. The base game bears the entire return, and wins pay left to right. Reel one has to be part of every line win. Only the largest win on each line counts.

Minty’s Expert Conclusion: Across 200 spins at 2.25 I had 75 paying spins, 45 of them below the stake, and a single line hit on spin 69 worth 304 times the bet carried the balance to 2,699.79. Adventure Palace, out the same June day in 2008, and the later Sun Quest are the same nine-line, five-reel frame from the same studio.

What 200 spins on the highway paid

So far I've encountered this sort of thing before, a couple of times, and what rescues 5 Reel Drive from being entirely written off as a cynical throwback is the same thing that has kept slots like it in the racks: a constant stream of small base-game wins with the occasional genuine surprise. Of my 200 spins, 75 paid something, and 45 of those returned less than the 2.25 I had put in. Across 200 spins at 2.25 a spin I took 2,000.00 to 2,699.79, a 255.5% return. The balance peaked at 2,780.09 on spin 87, and its lowest point across the session was 1,915.87. That came on the back of a single 684.00 line hit on spin 69 worth 304 times the stake. Nothing else got close: the next largest was 126.00 on spin 55, worth 56 times the stake.

There were certainly mixed feelings about 5 Reel Drive, and the first response is that it feels like a lazy reworking of an earlier slot. The mechanics are the ones those games shipped with: substitute for everything but the scatter, pay the scatter from any position, pay the lines left to right. Having said that, you can't help getting drawn in by the familiarity here. My 200 spins produced one hit worth 304 times the stake and a longest run without a win of nine spins, which ended on spin 17. If you have played earlier Games Global slots before you will have a decent idea of what you are getting into even before 5 Reel Drive loads. Nine lines and two special symbols are the whole of what there is to learn. It doesn't disappoint, yet nor does it astonish either. Spin 69 aside, my largest returns were 49.50 on spin 87 and 42.75 on spin 72.

Aged Microgaming-era games have enormous followings. As a standalone game, 5 Reel Drive is a respectable one. One of the later hits, 29.25 on spin 185, was worth 13 times the stake. In the overall development of slots, though, it is somewhat unmemorable.