Midnight Eclipse Slot – Free Demo

High 5 Games built this one around a single bonus

Five-reel online slots are seldom anything to get thrilled about. Midnight Eclipse is a High 5 Games release whose only feature is the Free Games Bonus. Now and then, though, game suppliers do manage to get it just right. I played 440 spins of it at a 500-credit stake. Players have grown progressively used to contemporary slots employing video game style animations, multi win-ways and quick-moving feature-packed action, so creating absorbing and diverting games confined to a fixed line set must surely be a considerable challenge to those suppliers who dare attempt.

One method to speak to the hearts of gamblers is by letting them know that the game in question is able of handing out wins worth dozens of times the stake. My biggest spin without a bonus attached paid 24,500 credits on spin 302, 49.0x the stake. In all honesty, that is what drew me to Midnight Eclipse in the first place. The four bonuses I did hit paid 58.0x, 9.8x, 40.0x and 19.0x the stake. Promise, however, can be found in most games these days, and it'll take more subtlety than that if you want players to return for more. Across the whole run, 220,000 credits went in and 187,250 came back.

The lines are fixed at forty

In Midnight Eclipse, the restrictions of the reel set are somewhat compensated for by the extended paylines, and normally, on a slot like this I'm accustomed to seeing 20 paylines, perhaps up to 25 at best. The lines are fixed, so there is no line count to trim on the way in. But here, High 5 Games has sidestepped the industry norm by opting for 40 fixed paylines. In my session 140 of the 440 spins paid something. The result of this is extended playtime, a rise in winning combinations and a smaller share of them worth the stake. Of those 140, 77 came in below the stake.

It arrives supplied with a default RTP setting of 96.00%, and Midnight Eclipse is a reasonably plain slot, not only in game design, but also in terms of visual look.

Why the pay table runs to fifteen symbols

Line wins pay left to right from reel 1 on adjacent reels. Wins are shown in credits unless marked as currency, and the paytable figures are not pre-multiplied. The largest win only counts per line, and every line win is multiplied by the bet per line. At the 500 stake I used throughout, that works out at 12.50 spread across each of the 40 lines.

On the reels you will discover an idol, two queens, two chiefs and an eclipse queen, all of them reel-locked in pairs - the idol and the two queens on reels 1 and 4, the two chiefs and the eclipse queen on reels 2 and 5 - and every picture symbol also lands as a doubled symbol counting as two of itself, which is why the pay tables extend all the way to 14 and 15 symbols. Card ranks A, K, Q, J and 10 fill in the lower end around them. The Wild substitutes for everything except the multi-Wild symbols and the Free Games scatter. It also turns up as Wild Wild and Wild Wild Wild, counting as two and three Wilds respectively. It appears only on reels 4 and 5 in the base game, and pays 1000 credits per line at the upper end, as do the idol and the chief. The base-game frame I captured shows the 500 stake returning a 1,000-credit total win, with line 27 paying 250 of it, two Free Games scatters sitting on reels 3 and 4 one short of a trigger, and a stacked Wild Wild on reel 5. When not arranged to trigger the bonus, the scatter is a dead blocking-symbol, and it is depicted by the Free Games symbol. It only lands on reels 2, 3 and 4, so those are the only places it can get in the way.

Minty Slots Verdict: Two thirds of what I won came off the base reels, and the four bonus rounds accounted for the other 34% — 63,400 credits of the 187,250 that came back against 220,000 staked. That split is what the split symbols buy you here: the base game keeps producing small line wins on 40 fixed lines while the feature stays a rare six-game visit, so the round-to-round shape is closer to Dangerous Beauty and Double Da Vinci Diamonds, the studio's other 40-line split-symbol builds, than to anything with a bought entry.

Six free games with locking Wilds on top

3 Free Games scatters anywhere on reels 2, 3 and 4 triggers 6 free games. My first trigger arrived on spin 28, and the second not until spin 170. No further games are added to your total for any additional scatter landing during the bonus. The other two came on spins 222 and 271. I found it to be wholly retrigger-free while testing and assessing the game, so players can never expect to play more games than the ones originally granted. Between them the four rounds paid 63,400 credits, 34% of everything I won.

During the free games, the bonus operates on its own reel set at the same lines and bet per line. The six games play out automatically once the round starts. Players also gain from Increasing Locking Wilds, as any Wild landing locks its spot for the rest of the round. Wild Wild and Wild Wild Wild exist only as transformations of a Wild that has already locked. It becomes Wild Wild on the next free game and Wild Wild Wild after that, raising the odds of landing sizeable winning combinations. Inside the bonus the Wild stands in for everything but its own doubled and tripled forms.

Four triggers in 440 spins

The bonus is not rare - four came up across 440 spins. That is one about every 110 spins on average, though the actual gaps ran from 49 spins up to 142. The split symbols add some variety to the game without becoming too irritating or exasperating. The stake stayed at 500 for all 440 spins.

My session returned 85.1% with 140 of 440 spins paying something, the longest dry spell was only 13 spins, and the peak came on spin 59. That dry spell ended on spin 102, and the spin that set the peak was worth 20.0x the stake. The best single spin I observed was worth 58.2x the stake.