Aloha Cluster Pays NetEnt Slot Review

Online Slot MachineAloha Cluster Pays
Slot ProviderNetEnt Casino Software
Jackpot SlotNo
Reels6
Win Lines0
RTP96.40%

Big kudos to NetEnt for coming up with something a bit different. Aloha cluster pays does indeed do exactly what it says on the tin… it pays in clusters rather than on traditional lines. The slot is also a 5 x 6 reel slot rather than the more usual 3 x 5. And actually it works pretty well.

Obviously the slot looks fantastic and is super smooth, what else would you expect? But this time out the sounds and mini animations really work well on the slot too, in fact it’s the first slot in a good while where I haven’t hit the mute button within the first minute!

So how does it work? Well as I say, you get paid by landing clusters of the same symbol so you can actually get a win by landing 2 full reels of the same symbol. On the other hand you can land a 5 in a row and win nothing. It takes a bit of getting used to but you will soon get the hang of it.

What else do we have? There’s a mini feature “sticky wins” which happens randomly and works like a…. well like sticky wins. This can throw out some nice little wins in the 10x to 20x stake bracket.

Free spins occur when you land 3 or more full or partial Free Spins symbols. The number of free spins awarded is a bit tight, 9, 10, 11 or 12 free spins. But what’s more tight is the retrigger. 3 more scatters during free spins only gives an extra 1 free spin with 2, 3 or 4 extra free spins for 4, 5 or 6 scatters.

Now time for the really important stuff. Can you win on this slot or is it like a lot of the more recent NetEnt efforts that just seem to drain the life out of your bank balance? Well I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about the relatively weak free spins wins and it is true, most of the time you are looking at between the 10 and 50 times your stake but it can throw up wins of 100 to 200 times your stake, even in the base game. But the slot doesn’t seem to drain the bank balance too quickly during the base game if you have a decent balance or set your stake level to be able to play for a couple of hundred spins. What I mean is you will very regularly go through a lot of spins without landing anything, but the slot does throw you a decent lifeline once in a while.

Of course a bad run can happen but conversely good runs happen with this slot as well so you can expect to have runs of 300+ spins with not much happening and no features. But you can also sometimes expect a couple of free spins features and a couple of sticky wins inside 100 spins. There’s definitely potential here. It doesn’t really mess around too much with different sized wins, you get a whole lot of zero return with a few 0.25 x stake and 0.50 times stake wins. After that the wins are nearly always round numbers, 1x stake, 2x, 3x, 5x, 10x, etc.

I was thinking it played similarly to Steam Tower (my current cash cow favourite) but it’s not quite the same. But certainly it is a slot I’m going to give some more attention to.

Try it here:

Rank
Casino
Bonus
Rating
Visit Casino
1
Redbet Casino
2
Slots Million Casino
3
AHTI Games Casino
4
Genesis Casino
5
Fun Casino