Irish Eyes Slot – Free Demo

A 2012 leprechaun that still pays from the left

Irish Eyes began life at NextGen Gaming, later part of the Light & Wonder stable. Irish themed slots are one variety of game that never runs out, and the theme is a recurring favourite amongst creators, who come back time and again to infuse some fortune into their game. Irish Luck from Playtech and Irish Frenzy from Blueprint Gaming work the same ground elsewhere on this site. The welcome news is there are studios like Light & Wonder. They can take an ordinary theme like leprechauns and come up with something pleasantly familiar. Here we have Irish Eyes, issued back in 2012. The pick round is called Pick and Win, and the free games arrive in blocks of 12. It blends a recognisably old-school appearance with a left to right payline system and a pick round, culminating in a batch of free games. The Leprechaun wild is the symbol that sets the pick round going.

One of Irish Eyes' less peculiar facets is its pay system, and instead of paying from any spot, symbols line up from the left-hand side of the grid. Line wins are multiplied by the stake on that line, while the Scattered Lady is multiplied by the total bet. The game area is organised in a 5-reel, 3-row layout. The card ranks, Nine up to Ace, need three of a kind before they pay anything. As long as a line is live, up to 25 of them at a time, matching symbols pay along it. Irish Eyes is not a highly volatile slot, which is no surprise given the age of it. It yields a modest RTP of 95.13%.

The paytable rewards two of a kind

Moving on to the paytable, the standard symbols are split into card symbols and picture symbols, and these higher paying symbols are composed of the Golden Path with Rainbow, the Pot of Gold and the Four-Leaf Clover. The Leprechaun pays as a line symbol too, alongside its work as the wild. They pay from just 2 of a kind, where the cards require 3. Two of the Golden Path with Rainbow are worth 6 times the line bet, and two of either the Pot of Gold or the Four-Leaf Clover 3 times. The Golden Path with Rainbow is worth 1,250 times the line bet for five. Four of them pay 500 times the line bet. The Pot of Gold and the Four-Leaf Clover are 500 times each. Both drop to 175 times the line bet for four.

Leprechauns on both ends start the pick

Irish Eyes carries a pick feature throughout the base game.

The Leprechaun is the wild, substituting for everything except the Scattered Lady. On its own line it pays 150 times the line bet for three and 1,000 times for four. Five of them on a line pay 10,000 times the line bet, the highest line prize. Reaching that needs the wild on all five reels of one active line. When a Leprechaun arrives on reel 1 and reel 5 at the same time, both turn into mystery symbols and the Pick and Win round begins, and the player picks one for a cash prize of up to 100 times the triggering bet, or a Pick Again.

Twelve free games, all prizes tripled

The Ladies are scatter symbols. They pay on the total bet rather than on a line, 5 times it for three and 100 times it for five. 3 or more in view grant 12 Free Games, with all prizes tripled, and during free games the Pick and Win round operates in the same way as outlined above, except its prize is not tripled when it triggers there. Four scatters pay 20 times the total bet as they land. To prolong the action, scatters arriving during the round retrigger the feature for another 12 games. None of the three rounds I hit retriggered, so each one ran its 12 games and stopped.

The Minty Breakdown: 480 spins at a 1.00 stake came back 74.7%, and the three free games rounds — 12 games each, prizes tripled, none retriggered — carried 80.00 of the 358.60 that returned. The biggest hit of the day was 47.00 on an ordinary base-game spin, ahead of anything either feature produced.

480 spins at 1.00 across 25 lines

True to its slightly corny name, Irish Eyes is indeed an Irish slot, though it's not just a math model delivering thrills. Over 480 spins at 1.00 across 25 lines I watched the balance move from 1,000.00 to 878.60, a session return of 74.7%, with 149 spins paying something and 89 of those paying less than the stake. That is 480.00 wagered against 358.60 returned. The barren stretches never extended past 16 spins. The longest of them ended on spin 309.

The gameplay runs steadily, supplying a constant flow of small wins as well, and the pay from the left concept isn't exactly novel, appearing in games like Novomatic's Book of Ra. But it's the spine of the game, lending it an extra splash of familiarity. Three of my captured spins paid 10.36, 4.20 and 3.64 at the 1.00 stake, which is the size of win the base game hands out most of the time.

1 / 3

At first it might seem like a typo seeing 2 symbol combinations on the paytable, but in practice, this combination of figures works out with the 25 lines as well as the tripled free games. Two Leprechauns on a line pay 10 times the line bet. The Pick and Win is a lift when it triggers, paying 40 times the stake on spin 284. The balance stood at 953.70 once it had paid. It's the tripled prizes in free games where their capacity to thrill grows, and here's where Irish Eyes does its best work, three rounds of 12 across the session paying 21.00, 36.00 and 23.00, 22% of everything won, and where the high point of the day was 1,010.76 on spin 32. Those rounds came on spins 63, 210 and 321.

A slow green world to sit in

One of the only irritating things is how far apart the free games sit, 147 spins between the first and the second and another 111 to the third, but it's nothing really, just a slight nuisance which disappears when a round finally arrives. The biggest single win of the whole session came outside the features, 47.00 on spin 355. It makes it simple to settle back into its green world for a while. The free games accounted for 80.00 of the 358.60 that came back. As the RTP indicates, the game yields ground slowly. The balance finished 121.40 below where it started. It can feel like a cumbersome shillelagh at times, but it is a truly uncomplicated Irish themed slot that was simple enough to play through.