Mega Joker Casino Slot (NetEnt)

This title isn’t unique, and you’ll see another game with the same title by Novomatic/Green Tube. Both Mega Joker slot games are classic slots and both date back to 2013, with NetEnt getting first out of the gate with their title by a couple of months.

Novomatic’s game is a massive jackpot game with an enormous top prize. You won’t win that life-changing, single-spin payout from the NetEnt game, but you do see one of the most generous sets of game stats that we’ve ever seen and a progressive jackpot game.

The Mega Joker online slot itself goes beyond setting up a classic screen and actually recreates the whole experience of playing on a cabinet game, with two layers of reels and a very unusual set-up.

NetEnt games are everywhere. The company is enormous, and we reckon that they have around about 200 games on the market at the moment (they release them so quickly that this figure – written in January 2019 – will be out of date by the time you read this).

They also make casino software, so they’re behind the scenes at some of your favourite online casino sites, as well as making the online video slots that you love playing there.

Their biggest titles tend to be massive hits, and in Starburst and Gonzo’s Quest, they have two bona fide classics of the world-wide slot scene that are amongst the most popular games ever.

Mega Joker slot machine didn’t quite make that grade, but is it a machine you should check out?

Let’s take a look in this Mega Joker slot review.

The Facts and Figures

Classic in many ways, Mega Joker’s full-on retro set-up makes it unusual in a current market dominated by 5-reel setups. The reels here are a 3-by-3 grid, with two sets of them that are both visible during play, switching between the two as you play.

Fewer symbols mean fewer pay-lines. Here there are just five paths to glory across the reels.

Betting is great for entry-level players, with a minimum bet of 0.01 coins (this should be a penny at UK casino sites) and a maximum of just 2 coins. (Always check the figures on the machine you are actually playing as these can be unique to a particular site.)

We think that this game is low variance, offering more regular but smaller pay-outs, but we can’t find a reliable source for that. This guess is based on a pretty low top prize for a single spin of 4,000 coins. With games regularly offering wins in the tens or hundreds of thousands of coins that are starkly lower than we’re used to seeing.

However, the game, which you can play on all devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) with JavaScript, HTML5, and Flash, offers good value with a standout theoretical return to player of 99%. (This figure applies in the bonus game.)

In fact, that RTP – which, it must be remembered is a very long-term measure – is almost uniquely generous among slots. The current market average is around the 96% mark. That alone makes Mega Joker worth a look.

How to play Mega Joker Slot

This game is essentially a mock-up of an old-fashioned real-world fruit machine. If you’re lucky enough to be considerably younger than us, you won’t remember when every pub, bookmaker and arcade in the country featured a couple of these flashing and beeping away in the corner.

The buttons look just as they did back in our misspent youths.

They run along the bottom of the bottom set of reels. A collect button to the left is unusual these days but was once standard. Then there’s a jackpot window. To the right of that are the bet, max bet, and spin windows.

The amount of your bet sets how many pay-lines are in play. Wins on the bottom reel with the maximum bet selected and paying out fewer than 2,000 coins switch you up to the top reels, where the more generous gameplay pumps up towards that 99% RTP. You also bet more, with a 20/40 coins bet choice. You can stay up there playing for high stakes, or press collect and return to the base game.

In the frame of the game, you’ll find the settings icon, the sound control, and the help button.

The Wins in Mega Joker Slot

The pay-table for this super-trad game is listed on the screen itself. With two sets of staking, this makes the payouts a bit complex. You can set Autospin using two symbols that look like old fashioned fruit machine tokens, and read all your game facts and figures in the frame too.

The joker triggers the jackpot – a random, progressive.

From minimum bets, you’ll win – for a set of three – 200 coins from treasure chests, 100 coins from a bell, 40 coins from watermelons, watermelons, 10 coins from lemons, 10 coins from cherries.

Mega Joker Bonus Games

The bonus game is basically contained within the base game in this super old-fashioned slot.

You need to win in the bottom set of reels with the top bet, to enter the second set of reels that basically bump up the payouts to a 10x multiplier and open up a super meter with jackpots.

The Verdict

Down to the potted palms and dodgy flock wallpaper in the background, this game produces a surprisingly accurate recreation of the experience of playing a fruity down the pub in 1986.

Whether that’s something you want to recreate is another matter entirely!

We enjoyed it, and we were there – with very bad haircuts, but at least with hair – in 1989. There’s a nice simplicity to playing with just three reels and three rows with five pay-lines. It’s something the designers of some of today’s complicated super-games seem to be getting wise to, with more and more cut-down games hitting the market.

The gameplay is simple and very self-contained, and that can be a relief too if you’ve played a game that needs you to remember five different types of wild and three bonus games. The only gripe we’ve got is that the screen can look a bit crowded.

Otherwise, we reckon you should give this time machine a trip at your favourite Mega Joker casino site now.