Three symbols match, the wins clear, and the reels start flaring yellow, sometimes one column, sometimes four or five together. That spread is the giveaway that the Reel Spooky King Megaways slot changes more than the paintwork. Inspired’s Reel King Megaways lights one reel per cascade, a slow march toward the bonus; its Halloween version can light most of the grid on one good spin, so the caped king turns up sooner and more often. Everything around that is the game you might remember, dressed for the season, with vampire royals, pumpkins replacing the cards on the King Spin reels, and a bubbling cauldron where the money bag used to sit.
Every winning combination clears its symbols and lets fresh ones tumble in from above, with more wins arriving as they settle. Each landing also lights a stretch of reels yellow from the left, and this is where the Halloween one parts from the original. One reel can light, or all six at once, and each subsequent cascade lights one more. Complete all six, and the Reel Spooky King feature begins; cascade again on the way in, and it upgrades to a higher tier.
Once the feature starts, 1 to 6 Reel Spooky Kings line up over the grid, each one spinning a small reel of 3 pumpkins. Match 3 red pumpkins for 10x your stake, 3 yellow for 5x, 3 blue for 2x, or any 3 mixed for 1x, and when a king’s pumpkins all light, he moves one rung up a free-spins trail. A king drops out when he spins a blank with fewer than 3 of his own reels lit, and the round runs until the last one goes.
Which tier you land depends on how many cascades you stack on the way in. Six lit reels start the plain Reel King round, with 1 or 2 kings and a trail to 15 spins. One more cascade takes it to Super King, 2 or 3 kings and a trail to 20. More still crowns the top-tier Spooky King, up to 6 kings and a trail that can reach 25.
Once the king round finishes with spins banked, the wheel gives you a choice. Either keep the free spins and cash in hand, or spin on for a higher number. A green result pays more, a red one can trim your spins or clear them, and the wheel caps at 25 free spins before it collects for you.
The free spins turn the backdrop red and change what the lit reels do. Now each winning cascade adds 1 to a multiplier with no cap that never slips back, and lights the reels red one at a time instead of yellow. Those red reels are sticky and stay lit from spin to spin, and completing all six brings the Reel Spooky King back to hand you up to 3 more spins and, if it falls your way, as much as 3 on the multiplier. A long round can leave that multiplier riding high as the spins roll on.
A win is matching symbols on neighbouring reels, counted from the leftmost, and only the cauldron pays from 2 in a row; the rest need 3 or more. Above the six main reels sits a horizontal top reel that feeds an extra symbol to reels 2-5, so the ways tally can hit 117,649 on a busy spin and sits well below it on a sparse one. The witch-hat wild lands only on that top reel and counts as any symbol on normal and free spins alike.
Bets sit between 20p and £20 a spin, with the full feature set open in free play through the demo, no deposit required. The return is 95.56%, a little under the 96.23% the original gives back, with medium-high volatility and a top prize of 12,500x your stake. A turbo toggle speeds the spins if the pace drags, one thing the first game never offers.
Figures below are multiples of your stake, paid per winning way and multiplied by the symbols filling each reel.
| Symbol | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cauldron | 50x | 25x | 10x | 5x |
| Ace | 7.50x | 2.50x | 2x | 1x |
| King | 2x | 1.50x | 1x | 0.25x |
| Queen | 2x | 0.75x | 0.50x | 0.25x |
| 10 | 1.75x | 0.60x | 0.40x | 0.20x |
| Jack | 1.75x | 0.60x | 0.40x | 0.20x |
| 9 | 1x | 0.60x | 0.25x | 0.20x |
| Watermelon | 1x | 0.50x | 0.25x | 0.15x |
| Blueberry | 0.90x | 0.50x | 0.25x | 0.15x |
| Cherries | 0.80x | 0.40x | 0.20x | 0.10x |
Someone clearly had fun with the Halloween makeover, from the organ sting on a decent win to the vampire kings and their pumpkin reels. What earns this a look over it' predecessor, though, is the reel-lighting and the king round it feeds. That round is where this game has always been at its best. It returns 95.56% where the original gives back 96.23%, so the livelier trigger costs you two-thirds of a percentage point. The maths asks a quiet price for it, giving back a little more to the house than before. It plays a shade livelier than the game it copies, and for Halloween that is plenty.
The multi-reel lighting earns its keep, and since the king round is the best thing in the game, meeting him more often is worth more than any of the cosmetic changes. The staged bonus that made the original worth keeping is intact, from the pumpkin-reel king round through the gamble wheel to the free spins, and that uncapped multiplier still powers the round once you are inside it. The Halloween skin is a good one too, played for laughs more than scares.
Strip off the cobwebs, and it is the same game already on the site, down to the paytable, the top cap and the staged bonus, so anyone who has the original is paying for a skin and one trigger tweak. The return is 0.67% lower for the privilege, a mark against it on value alone. Faster lighting costs some of the old drama, as well, since the first game’s slow one-reel-at-a-time build has a wind-up that the quicker version loses.
On any normal spin, the job is to keep the cascades coming, because each one lights another reel, and only an unbroken run gets to all six. Where the base version lights only one reel per cascade, here the count can jump. A fat cascade lights several columns at once, and every cascade after it adds another, so all six light in only a few spins and the feature fires on runs that would have stalled on the older grid.
That is roughly how ours arrived. Around 40 spins in, a full grid lit yellow and one further cascade carried us straight into the Super King round on 3 kings. They spun their pumpkin reels, moved us to 11 spins on the trail and handed over £6.00, and then the wheel asked whether to gamble the lot for a shot at 16. We kept the 11 and banked the win, which sent us into the free spins.
The free spins are the pay-off, and the board turned red as they began. Every cascade pushed an uncapped multiplier up by one and lit a reel red, and the lit reels stayed put across the round. Twice we lit all six and the king returned, once with one extra spin, once with two. The multiplier did the rest, finishing at x16, by which point even the smaller wins paid well. Three wins triggered their own win screens on the way, a £77.40 that came up as a ‘Huge Win’ and two ‘Big Wins’ of £20.80 and £30.00, with the round closing on a £177.20 total.
That whole back half plays exactly as it does on the original. The kings, the trail, the gamble and the runaway multiplier carry over untouched, as does the fruit-ladder paytable that hides under the pumpkins and gravestones.
The lighting change is easy to miss on the rules screen, and it does more than anything else here. The king turns up on spins the original would have wasted, and in a game built around reaching him, that is what settles this review.
