Whispering Winds Slot Review

We have not done a slot review in many months, not counting our Fantasma Games ones. If you are a frequent BTCGOSU reader, then you know our main focus in recent times has been on building up our crash game library, but now we are moving back to slots. Since we think we have done enough work in that department that no one in the sector can beat us. So, for our first slot back, we decided to choose a title from Play’n GO, which has been trending in the news but has received heaps of criticism from other reviewers for being unoriginal. The game in question is Whispering Winds, a samurai-themed spinner that will hit the market in mid-July. We got a sneak peek at this title and are looking to give our opinion if the heat it has faced is justified. So read on below to find out in our Play’n GO Whispering Winds review.

Theme & Design

Who does not love the samurai, the warrior class from premodern Japan featured as heroes and badasses in various video games and movies? They held a privileged position in the Japanese social hierarchy and became the country’s dominant military force during the Kamakura period. If you are a fan of theirs, you likely know all about their code of conduct, known as Bushido, which emphasizes honor, discipline, and loyalty. In the interactive gaming sphere, these historical warriors also have carved out their niche, and you may have seen them in games like Quickspin’s Sakura Fortune, Relax’s Torri Tumble, Densho, and Warrior Ways by Hacksaw Gaming, among others.

The gambling entertainment here happens in the courtyard of a Japanese temple, with the reels spinning inside a wooden temple structure of their own, where the reels are semi-transparent. The setting in Whispering Winds is either dusk or dawn. We are not quite sure, but we lean towards the latter, with light mist moving behind the gaming layout.

The graphics in this slot are on par with most other reel-spinning products from Play’n GO. They are nice to look at and feature vibrant colors. Much of the animations incorporated in this game are similar to ones in other releases from this provider. The famed Book-Of-win-lines are also in play here. The music is a mellow Asian string tune, with the audio-scape in Whispering Winds primarily leaning on the loud sound effects. We must say that we did not enjoy the screaming samurai noises, but they did give this spinner a unique touch.

Regarding the button configuration, Play’n GO has taken a step away from the classic one. You get to use a simpler betting setup at the bottom of the wooden temple, where you get the bet selector, spin/auto-spin buttons in the lower-right corner of the temple, with the info button and your site balance in the left one. At the bottom, you have a black bar from where you can mute this game or enter its settings page.

Specs & Gameplay

Whispering Winds has a 5×3 grid setup with twenty-five paylines, medium variance, and a max exposure setting of x2,000. The bet sizes in this slot move from $0.05 (a stake figure we rarely see these days) up to a maximum of $100 per spin. Regarding the RTP of this product, you can find this game incorporating six different return-to-player specs. These are 84.27%, 87.24%, 91.20%, 94.23%, and 96.23%. The latter two are the most common. 94.23% is the default one, as far as we know.

You win rewards in the Whispering Winds slot when you land three to five matching symbols on adjacent reels, with this game paying out prize combos left to right, with only the highest win sum getting awarded per spin. The four low-pay royals in this spinner all payout x2 for five-of-a-kind combinations, and the image premiums produce prizes of x8 to x20 when five instances of them stop in view in a round. The samurai wild substitutes the discussed pay tokens, but he also pays the same x20 for a five-of-a-kind combination as the premium masked samurai. He duplicates that token’s prizes for three (x1), four (x10), and five (x20) instances of him hitting in a spin.

Bonus Features

There are two bonus features in Whispering Winds. The first is the Gold Respin mode, which you activate by landing six gold coins. That will supply you with three Gold Respins, where only coins hit, with values up to x1,000, remaining sticky for the rest of the duration of this round. Each time a coin appears, the spin counter resets to three, and when this mode concludes, your accumulated values get paid out. The most you can win here is x1,000 of your round stake, which usually happens by filling the entire grid with coins.

The Mega Free Spins is a bonus round that you trigger when three dragon scatters materialize in view. When you do, you get provided with five complimentary reel rotations where a 3×3 symbol will hit at random positions as long as this mode is active. You can retrigger it until you reach the maximum allowed limit of forty-five on-the-house spins, and you can also activate the Gold Respins here.

GOSU Verdict

We must agree with the critics Whispering Winds is nothing to write home about. However, it is not as bad as some make it out to be. We guess much of the hate stems from this slot being a Legion Gold reskin. That is a product that came out in February 2022 and got a sequel almost precisely two years later named Unleashed. We like Unleashed better than this game, as we prefer the visuals there. They make the gaming action pop more, even though the gameplay is the same.

That said, we are not reskin/clone haters, but we understand that gamblers get annoyed when providers re-work games. As a standalone entity, we think that Whispering Winds is average. And we would call this slot a more suitable pick for casuals than hard-core reel-spinning fanatics.  

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