Hey, hey players, do you ever get the feeling some studios are plum out of ideas and resort to reusing what's already there to keep the wheels of production rolling? If the answer is yes, and the thought makes your blood curdle, here's a doozy from Pragmatic Play to stoke the fires even further. It's called Fortune of Giza and is an Egyptian themed slot that uses sticky wild multipliers in free spins to provide maximum thrills. It might be full of sun, sand, and pointy stone structures, but even they aren't enough to disguise the fact Fortune of Giza is a simple reskin of the Pragmatic Play 2019 classic, The Dog House.
Well, we've pretty much said everything there is to say about what Fortune of Giza looks like. The spirit of being unoriginal has carried over to Fortune of Giza's presentation, which depicts some of the main tourist sights at the Giza pyramids. Let's dig deep and say one interesting thing about Fortune in Giza is the clouds rapidly drifting along the horizon – is it a moody day, or is a storm brewing?
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Perhaps we'll never find out, but we do know that the highly volatile math model can be just as moody. The game's stats have remained exactly as they were in the previous slot, meaning RTP comes in at least two known settings – 96.51% or 95.51%, with the same 6750x winning potential as before too. Placing bets can be achieved by selecting a stake from 20 p/c to $/€100, whilst The Dog House round 2's pandemonium is available on any device.
Taking a further look at the mechanics, Fortune of Giza is played on a 5x3, 20 payline game grid, which results in wins when landing 3 to 5 matching symbols. Winning combinations must land in adjacent reels and start from the leftmost side of the panel to qualify. Ten regular symbols can be used, the first five being 10-A playing card symbols paying 1.25-2.5x the bet for five of a kind, and five classic symbols of Ancient Egypt as the premiums, coughing up 5 to 37.5x the bet when landing five of a kind across a line. Yep, same as before.
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Onto the features, where wilds are instrumental in the base game and receive an extra boost in free spins. Wilds appear on reels 2, 3, or 4 and substitute for anything except the scatter symbol. In addition, wilds land with a multiplier of x2 or x3, which increases the value of any winning line they are part of. If more than one wild is used in the win, the multiplier values are added to each other.
Scatter symbols appear on reels 1, 3, or 5, and when all 3 are in view, 5x the bet plus entry to the free spins bonus round is awarded. In the next step, a 3x3 grid triggers to calculate how many free spins will be awarded. The number in each cell is tallied up, resulting in anything from 9 to 27 free spins. What gives free spins their extra dose of pep is when wild symbols land, they remain in their position for the rest of the bonus round. Like in the base game, wilds land on the middle three reels and have x2 or x3 multipliers.
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At the time of review, Pragmatic Play had been firing off slots like a broken fire hydrant, hosing players down with wave after wave of new games. It would be tough for any studio to keep such a pace up without resorting to one or two clones being thrown into the mix. Still, while you can understand why Pragmatic Play chose to clone The Dog House, the end result might have been more compelling if they'd picked a more original new skin to go with it. What makes the situation extra dubious is the fact Pragmatic Play released Cleocatra not long ago, which was another Egyptian themed slot built on a sticky multiplier wild concept. In its defence, Cleocatra wasn't the straight-up clone Fortune of Giza is, plus it had cute cats.
However, while Fortune of Giza has nothing new to offer in terms of gameplay, its sticky wild multipliers can be as exciting as they were in The Dog House. Actually, perhaps not quite as good because several years have passed since The Dog House first bounded onto the scene. Since then, a bunch of great sticky wild multiplier games have cropped up in the interim, NetEnt's Dead or Alive 2 or Relax Gaming's hip hop pup slot Top Dawg$ being two prime examples. As such, Fortune of Giza doesn't pack the same punch as its predecessor, despite having the same max win of 6,750x the bet. It doesn't help that Fortune of Giza is a repeat performance, and its lacklustre use of such a common theme scores it fewer marks on the personality meter compared to the capering canines of the original game.
After playing through Fortune of Giza, it became apparent that much of The Dog House's popularity was due to its playful pups and optimistic attitude. Fortune of Giza's look is simply too generic by comparison. It performs okay and has successfully passed through the cloning procedure without a hitch but is just too mind-numbingly unoriginal to be much more than catalogue padding.
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