Black Widow Review

Theme and Story Line

Beware this truly fatal femme fatale, Black Widow’s theme is 1980s erotic thrillers complete with white collar victims and a smokey eyed killer in a fur coat.

The symbols are in order of value the Black Widow, three interchangeable fellas in Oxford cloth and ties and some face cards with murder weapons.

There’s also a Wild symbol and the green poison bottle that gets you your 7 bonus spins.

Graphics, Sounds and Animations

The graphics are nicely designed (if you can get past the smug-looking gentleman victims), and the reels well animated.

A lot of attention was given to the sound design and this is where the game really shines. There is a kind of synth jazz tune which plays that reflects both the 80s thriller style and the genre of film noir which that drew on. And the spins and wins both sound excellent.

So overall the graphics and sounds are good.

Gameplay

The game has a nice little twist with its Stacked Symbols feature. Each reel has a block of ‘stacked symbols’. The specific symbol that goes on each block is randomly assigned at the start of each spin, but will be the same for all stacked symbols on a given reel.

This can make for some exciting spins when the bonus symbol gets stacked early on.

The game has 40 winlines and no option to play any fewer so make sure you budget accordingly. The variance on this game (more on which later) can make it quite an expensive proposition otherwise.

Wilds, Bonuses and Free Spins

The Bonus symbol is a vial of green poison which you need to hit three of to trigger the bonus rounds. Unfortunately you only receive seven spins, and although you can win more the odds of doing so does not improve so anticipate those 7 being all your bonus spins.

In keeping with the theme of sexually entangled men, the widow can ‘capture’ men in the middle reel of the bonus rounds with each man captured there adding to a multiplier counter for the bonus spins.

The Wild symbol also plays by itself as the strongest multiplier resulting in payouts on the winline ranging up to 1000x your bet per line. But if you hit that you’re likely to be taking home a load of other winlines too with the wild aspect of that symbol.

Bet Sizes, RTP and Variance

The website we tested allowed coin sizes between £0.01 and £1. Because you must play all 40 winlines that made for a bet size of £0.40 to £40 per spin.

The bonus is both hard to trigger and harder to extend, making for a high variance slot with lot of dead spins and the occasional big hit when all your stacks line up. We are fans of high variance slots here as they fit well with our recommended slot strategies.

The game has an RTP of 96% which is the average for the industry and so is neither especially good nor especially bad for an online slot game. However coupling this with high variance does make the slot quite attractive to those who like high-risk high-reward propositions.

Conclusion

Black Widow is a nice, if eccentric slot machine, with a good risk to reward ratio provided by its high variance and average RTP.

The game is quite fun with several nice features including a bonus accumulation, stacked symbols and some clever bonus mechanics that work well both as a game and with the story line of the slot machine.