Wonders of Christmas Slot Review

NetEnt has not been in the news lately. In fact, this provider’s release schedule has dwindled down significantly recently, with lull periods of several months before a new NetEnt game hit gaming markets worldwide. However, in some months, this company has been busier than others. Like in September 2022 (two NetEnt slot releases) and as this year draws to a close. Since the holidays are almost here, we thought we should promote a novel holiday-themed spinner, as we were quite confident that multiple ones would hit casino lobbies in December. Naturally, they did, and the one that grabbed our attention the most so far was Wonders of Christmas from NetEnt. It debuted at the tail-end of November. And it made a significant impact in some markets while failing in others. Below, we provide you with our analysis of this X-mas spinner.

Theme & Design

Did you know that the origins of Christianity’s most famous holiday stem from both Roman and pagan cultures? The Romans celebrated two holidays in December in honor of the gods of agriculture and the sun, Saturn and Mithra. In pagan cultures, December, as the darkest time of the year, served as a month for celebrations that incorporated the lighting of bonfires to keep the darkness at bay. The Romans implemented many of these customs in their celebrations, and as Christianity spread throughout the Old Continent, the religion could not remove many of these old pagan-inspired traditions. Given that no one knew Jesus’ birthday, pagan rituals got adopted to honor his birth. Today, Christmas is not only one of the most festive times of the year. But it has also turned into a sizeable industry. And slot developers have taken advantage of this holiday to create reel-spinning games that get played like crazy in December and January.

Wonders of Christmas is another example of NetEnt trying to profit from the X-mas craze by creating another holiday-motif slot. Maybe you Remember Jingle Spin, or Santa vs. Rudolf, also from this Swedish developer now operating under Evolution. Wonders of Christmas has a festively-decorated home as its setting. The base game gets played on the front porch on a snowy night, while the bonus round occurs inside, near a burning fireplace flanked by a comfy chair and a Christmas tree.

The visuals here are 2D painterly graphics, and the sound effects are appropriate to the utilized theme. The soundtrack of Wonders of Christmas is the real star here, as it features traditional X-mas tunes and some smooth holiday cheer, lounge-like music.

The button configuration here is the standard transparent NetEnt setup, which has the spin functions in the middle, with the wager options on the left of these and the bet/balance info on the right.

Specs & Gameplay

No surprise, Wonders of Christmas is a high variance game with a max win potential of an impressive x10,000. The max bet here is $50, and the minimum is $0.1. The default RTP stands at 95.05%. But it can fall to 91.05%. Yet, also it can rise to 96.06% at some operators. The used grid layout here is a 3-4-5-4-3 one with twenty active paylines.

The low-pay tokens of this title are A-10 royals, producing wins of x0.4 to 0.x9 for five matching instances of symbols from this batch appearing in view on the same spin. The high-pay ones are a Christmas sock, a snow globe, a gingerbread house, a locomotive, and a sled. The gift-wrapped box is the wild, paying rewards of x5 for five-of-a-kind combos. The rest of the symbols from this group yield prizes from x1.2 to x5 from the same type of combinations (five-of-a-kind).

Wins here form when three or more identical symbols line up on adjacent reels starting from the leftmost ones. Only the highest-win combo per line gets paid.

A Christmas tree is the scatter of Wonders of Christmas.

Bonus Features

When the gift wild hits, it marks its landed position with a frame, turning it wild on the next spin. Also, a gift token can randomly turn into golden wilds and set active frames. When that happens, all adjacent framed spots turn wild on the next rotation. That can occur up to five times. Know that all the regular and active frames do not vanish from the game’s layout until they morph into wilds or the free spins round begins.

There is also a gift meter in play. It gets filled every time a wild appears in a position without a frame or an actively framed one. That adds one to four points to this bar, and when it reaches two hundred, the Free Spins Multiplier gets increased from x1 to x1,000. Nevertheless, after each upgrade, the bar resets to zero. When the meter produces a multiplier of x1,000, no more points can get added to it until the Free Spins begin. It can only get boosted in the base game, and its value gets applied at the end of the bonus mode.

Hitting three tree scatters on the middle reels triggers the Free Spins bonus mode. That produces three complimentary reel rotations. Framed spots that did not turn wild on the activating spin morph into sticky coins worth between x0.5 to x50 in this round.

GOSU Verdict

What did we think of NetEnt’s Wonders of Christmas slot? In our eyes, this is an acceptable holiday release. Gameplay-wise, it is super similar to Rome: The Golden Years. That is not a bad thing, as we quite liked that spinner. Some will call it a clone of that game with a different theme. And this is something we cannot dispute. Still, this slot has a good max win potential on paper, and its mechanics keep things interesting. Its presentation is not too shabby, and it has some degree of charm to it. So for the X-mas season, give it a go if you are looking for some cheerful spinning fun.

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