Publisher: Phantom EFX
Developer: Phantom EFX
System requirements: Windows 2000 or later; AMD, Celeron or Pentium III 700 CPU; 512 mb RAM; 850 mb free hard drive space; DVD-ROM drive
Genre: Casino/Adventure
Release date: Available now

If you’ve ever sat at a slot machine in a casino for any length of time, the experience is a lot of things (frustrating, invigorating, etc), but never boring. You keep dumping in your hard-earned cash (plus the seed money that the tour bus operator gave you to keep you there), knowing that the very next quarter could send you home a millionaire. Well, developer Phantom EFX, which has made it’s bones on creating slots simulations, has finally found the way to make playing the one-armed bandit a crashing snoozer, and it’s called Reel Deal Slots Adventure.

Here’s what Phantom has done: they’ve taken 20 variations of a casino slot machine layout and mixed them into a story, similar to the one Pop Cap tells in between levels of Jewel Quest. In this story, an adventurer and his trusty desert guide search for the Sister Queens of Nubial, Alexus and Mariah, who disappeared along with the entire ancient Egyptian town of Nubial hundreds of years ago. You progress through the story by playing a slot machine until its individual victory requirement has been met. Some of these include winning a minimum amount of credits, winning (or losing) a set number of spins, or simply playing the machine for a target length of time.

The interfaces of all 20 machines are exactly the same. Large square buttons are placed beneath the reels. With these buttons you can place bets, choose how many lines on which to place bets, and cash out to your bank. You start out with $2,500 in Real World money and Dream World money (playing with this increases the odds of bigger payouts). Once you make your selections, press the Play button and the machine’s reels spin. When they stop, any matches that make you money are displayed and the winnings are added to your bank. This repeats until you meet your victory quota, earning you some bonus cash and a trip to the next part of the story—where the whole thing starts all over again. Fifteen times, in the first part of the journey alone.

Fortunately, there’s more to Reel Deal Slots than just watching the wheels go round and round. Matching certain combinations of icons on all of the machines takes you to a bonus minigame, which gives you the chance to make a big chunk of extra swag, something that can be a big help if you have to win lots of money in a short time. There’s a bowling game that has you trying to hit a specific pin for a score multiplier. There’s another in which you click on a screen filled with puffer fish, gaining you bonus points until one of them explodes. And there’s one in which you try to scare a helpless teen in a haunted house. This last was most important in my playthrough; I needed to make $8,500 in less than 10 minutes, so scaring the tar out of Shaggy saved me from having to replay the machine.

There are two main problems that make Reel Deal Slots the biggest waste of your gaming dollar this year. First, each of the 20 slot machines plays the same as all of the others. The only difference between the first machine and the last is the graphics; their layouts are all identical. Throwing in an old-time machine with three icons to match and an actual arm to pull would’ve been a nice change of pace, but sadly none are found in this collection. Second, and most significant, Reel Deal Slots is a tedious, mind-numbingly boring time-waster that seems to revel in its slowness. Of the first 15 stages of the game, not one of them took less than 10 minutes to finish, and one of them took me 225 spins to finally win and move on. I found myself mashing on the Max Bet button for literally hours, hoping that at some point this game would start to be fun, but it never was.

We here at Avault pride ourselves on our willingness to go to any lengths, face any trials, endure any hardships to help our readers avoid wasting their stimulus-enhanced money on the boatloads of worthless dreck available out there. Phantom has quite an impressive catalog of casino-based games, so no doubt there are a few of you who might actually be interested in Reel Deal Slot Adventures. But please believe me when I tell you that life is too short to be wasting precious hours of it on this pointless, tedious game. If you feel you must take a gamble like that, do it in a real casino; at least there you won’t have to worry about passing out from pure boredom.

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