Fire Joker

The big grinning face on the front of the Fire Joker slot game is a familiar one on slots and casino sites in the UK and around the world.

The game is something of an oldie now, but it’s a real classic in a couple of senses. First of all, it is very much a retro-styled classic game with a 3 by 3 grid and a lot of the old familiar look of a classic slot. And it’s become a classic by mixing that element with really innovative gameplay that has an almost arcade-like feel to it.

The main bonus feature is where you see this most obviously, with the Wheel of Multipliers offering very big prize potential, alongside a respin feature.

This is a Play’n GO title. The Swedish developer has a long history going back to 1997 and apparently a bright future. They are currently easily a top-10 slot provider in the UK and their most popular title is the amazingly ubiquitous Rich Wilde and the Book of Dead, which has spawned a slew of spin-offs and sequels. This title is in their top 10 and is due to be remade shortly with a Freeze version due to join the family in 2021.

The company can produce classics, but also innovate, perhaps most notably in the Reactoonz series, which is a really vital set of games with hilarious alien graphics. Fire Joker is much simpler than that game, but it’s a classic that remains popular and here we’ll look at why that might be the case.

Let’s dive in.

How to Play Fire Joker Slot

Fire Joker shows a very simple face to the world. It has a three by three grid of symbols, so there are just nine symbols in play. The wins are delivered along five bet lines. The top prize is an 800-times stake, and you can bet from 5p to £100 on this game. Make sure you know that you’re playing with money that you can safely afford to lose. The game is rated as medium variance, which is a ratio that rates the size of prizes against their frequency: high volatility games pay out bigger prizes but pay out less often. The game has an RTP range. RTP is a theoretical return to the player and it is the percentage of the money bet on a game over its entire lifetime, that is likely to be returned to players in wins. In this game, it starts at 94.23% or a house edge of just under 6%, and it can be altered to suit the market.

The game is simple to play. The panel has the usual Play’n GO betting selector along the middle, with a spin button to the right and the paytable and autoplay options to the left.

Autoplay options will have to be turned off at UK sites later in 2021 because of a ruling by the UK Gambling Commission.

Hit the paytable button and you’ll find this:

• Sets of three are all that matters here.
• Xs, payout 2-times stake.
• Cherries four times.
• Lemons five times.
• Grapes six times.
• Plums seven times stake.
• Bars payout a 15-times stake.
• Stars pay out 20-times stake.
• Sevens payout 25-times stake.
• the joker pays out 80-times stake and is a wild.

Bonus Games

Classic games ought to be relatively simple, and Fire Joker delivers in that sense. It has bonus features, but they are not multi-layered in the way that some modern games are.

We have the joker as a wild.

• Respins are branded as the Flaming Respin. It kicks in on spins that don’t deliver a prize – an unusual take on a respins feature – spinning the reels again if there are two stacked symbols on the reel. The stacked reels stay in place and the final reel spins to give you a chance of a new winning combo popping up.
• Wheel of Multiplier feature is triggered if the reels are filled with a set of the same symbol. The player spins the wheel to win a multiplier on the prize that can be up to a 10-times stake.

There is no free spins round on this game. There isn’t a jackpot either, and the biggest possible prize is delivered with a 10-times (the highest possible) multiplier on the highest possible win to deliver an 8,000-times stake result.

Fire Joker Slot: The Verdict

In a sense, our verdict here doesn’t matter. It seems that the people have spoken by keeping a game that was released in 2016 so close to the top of the UK slots charts. And Play’n Go know what they are doing and wouldn’t be delivering sequels and spin-offs if the game wasn’t a hit.

Because it is such a simple game there’s a limit to what we can say about Fire Joker and it is a game that is best experienced rather than explained – like love or LSD.

It looks nice in a cut-down sort of way, with a real nod to classic cabinet games going right back to the pre-war era. This game feels like it could be made out of mahogany. However, because it’s so simple it works really well on mobile screens and was ahead of the trend towards simpler games that has been triggered by the massive growth in the number of mobile users.

There’s no free spins feature. That’s unusual, and for some players, it will probably be a deal-breaker. However, there’s an unusual respins feature and an excellent extra feature in the Wheel of Multipliers.

What we don’t like is RTP ranges. We don’t think this feature is ever really going to work in the best interest of players and instead is likely to offer them less good value. We’d rather developers would give up on this feature, but we suspect they are extremely unlikely to. If you like to know the RTP when you play a game then you need to check it when you play.

It's a simple game, but one with depth, and well worth checking out.