Northern Sky

With the Northern Sky video slot, available at Quickspin online casinos, you'll get a beautiful background of a lake, trees and mountains just after sunset. A number of animals show up on the reels in a special, colorful, crystallized form along with similarly styled diamonds of the same color. This game has gorgeous graphics, but it actually centers around a re-spin based type of gameplay, and this is where most of the action comes into play. You'll really want to see how the features of this title work before you start playing because they're a bit different than what you've probably experienced in other titles.

Layout and Format

The actual format for this game is pretty simple, and it has nine paylines with five reels and three rows. This is an older style of format that you don't see all that much with more modern games. However, you'll wager various amounts that give you more even numbers than nine-line slots tend to, and that helps to make the betting easier to keep up with. Along these lines, you can wager between $0.10 and $100 per spin, and that puts players in a position to pick from 16 different overall bet sizes. All of the wins in this game are also multiplied by the total wager instead of dealing with the individual amounts bet on the specific paylines.

The Re-spin Feature

The main gameplay feature that affects the normal play uses re-spins. The way this works is that players can get wins normally from their initial paid spin. These wins are paid out, and they are encased in circles while all of the other symbols on the reels drop out of the way to allow new symbols to fall into place for re-spins. If you get extra payouts by putting together new winning combinations or by extending existing combinations, then you're paid out according to what's on the paylines at that point, and you'll get even more re-spins. This continues until there are no new payouts.

You get paid on the final re-spin when there are no new payouts as well, and this has an effect of making sure you always get paid at least twice for every single payout that you earn in this game. Along these lines, that means you'll need to think about how that affects the total wins when you look at the sizes of the payouts themselves.

Free Spins Bonus Round

If you get three of the bonus symbols on the reels on one paid spin (which includes adding them up from all of the re-spins), then you're given a free spins round. The number of bonus symbols (with the snow-capped mountains) that you've collected on that spin/set of re-spins is noted on the short meter on the left-hand side of the reels.

During the free spins mode, only the animal symbols appear on the reels, and the re-spin feature is available as usual. This makes it much easier to hit several winning combinations, and because the animal symbols are the high-level symbols in this game, it also puts you in a position where you can get bigger pays on average than in the regular game.

Animal and Diamond Pays

The four animal pays start with the golden deer. Five of a kind gives you a payout of 40x. Five of the red pair is worth 10x, and five of a kind combinations of the green wolf is worth a solid 5x win. The blue owl gets you 4x for five. Remember that these are all multiples of the total bet, not a line bet wager, and you always get paid at least twice their listed value thanks to getting paid for them twice at a minimum with the re-spin feature.

The lower-level symbols are three different diamonds that are in the same colors as the bear, wolf and owl listed above. You'll get 2x for five of the red diamond, 1.5x for five of the green diamond and 1x for five of the blue one.

In Summary

With the Northern Sky video slot, Quickspin is giving players a very nice graphical style with the crystal-like symbols. They're also giving players some pretty exciting gameplay overall thanks to the re-spin feature that gives you lots of opportunities for multiple payouts on each spin, and you're actually guaranteed at least two payouts every single time that you hit a winning combination. The best thing about this game is probably the fast-paced action, but the free spins bonus feature doesn't hurt the situation either with improved reel sets.