Great Blue Slot from developer Playtech has been around a long time now, but the slot has recently been in the spotlight again after its conversion to the newer HTML5. The game now has a stated theoretical RTP of 96.03%, although it isn’t clear what changes have been made to the game to achieve this. Great Blue features 25 pay lines and even allows you to choose how many you wish to play – a rare luxury these days. Land a full screen of the top whale symbol to win 10,000x your stake.
There is nothing complex about Great Blue – you’re constantly hoping for the scatters, just like so many other online slots, but the stacked wilds on every reel do add some excitement to the base game as well. When you do hit three or more scatters, you’ll be asked to choose from five shells – the best combination is the x8 multiplier plus 15 extra free spins on top of the eight you receive automatically.
Great Blue is a true classic, so there is endless information, reviews, opinions (both good and bad) posted about it all over the web. Our advice is to forget all that and fire up our free demo slot of Great Blue right here instead!
| Provider | Playtech |
| Reels | 5 |
| Rows | 3 |
| Paylines | 25 |
| Bonus Rounds | 1 |
| Bet Range | 0.25 - 50 |
| Volatility | High |
| RTP | 96.03% |
| Our Rating | 8.0 |
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Great Blue Slot Theme, Stakes, Pays & Symbols
Because Great Blue was so successful, many other slot developers created underwater-themed slots, hoping to cash in on a little bit of Playtech’s success. Queen of Atlantis even uses the same shell and pearl symbol for its scatter, as does Play’N’Go’s Pearl Lagoon. Whilst researching for this review, I googled “underwater slots” and found dozens of Great Blue clones, but not one of them impressed me more than Playtech’s original. The new high-resolution graphics look great regardless of your screen size – it doesn’t matter if you are playing using your phone, a tablet, or an ultrawide monitor – everything looks perfect on all devices. People seem to love the ambient underwater sound of Great Blue, and I 100% agree with them – this is one game that doesn’t make me want to reach for the mute button.
One of the biggest reasons for the popularity of Great Blue was its exciting paytable – the game made a huge point of letting you know a full line of wilds pays 10,000x your line bet, which was one of the largest payouts of any online slot machine when the game was first released. The scatters pay big too – 500x your stake for all five, increasing to 7,500x your total stake if you happen to hit them during a 15x bonus round. The shark and turtle symbols also have great payouts, and best of all, every win is doubled if the combination includes at least one wild symbol. Without a doubt, Great Blue has a tonne of payout potential, but keep an eye on your balance – sometimes you can go hundreds of spins without a bonus round.
The UK Gambling Commission has been interfering a lot with slot developers over the past couple of years – UK players are not allowed to use bonus buy features for example, and autoplay has now been removed. Playtech decided just to remove the autoplay function from their games altogether when they updated them to HTML5, and even fast play mode has been prohibited for UK players as well. Some games can be painfully slow to play, and constantly having to click spin or hit space genuinely does take a lot of the fun out of playing slots for us. If you choose to play the maximum of 25 lines, the minimum bet will be €0.25, with the highest stake on the game reaching €50.
Base Game & Modifiers
Great Blue uses the standard 5×3 layout, and the 25 paylines are mostly where you would expect them to be. There is the odd occasion where it looks like you should have won something big, yet the symbols are not actually on one of the pay lines, though thankfully this is rare.
Stacked Wilds
During the base game, the top wild symbol is stacked on all five reels. Should you hit a full screen, you will win 10,000x your stake. If you manage to get some wilds son each reel but don’t entirely fill the screen, the wins can still be very big, especially if the spaces without wilds are filled with sharks or turtles.
Great Blue Slot Free Spins Feature
After hitting three or more scatters you will be presented with five shells from which you can pick two which will decide how your feature plays out. The bonus begins with 8 free spins at a 2x multiplier, and the five shells contain 5x and 8x multipliers, along with 15, 10, and 8 free spins.
Our favourite combination is the 15 spins with the 8x multiplier, which results in 23 free spins at 10x. In all honesty though, if we get one of the multipliers from the shells, we are happy! If you pick both the multipliers you’ll have eight free spins at a 15x multiplier, but if the slotting gods are on your side that day they might throw you three more scatters during those eight spins, which results in 23 spins at 15x multiplier!
Great Blue Slot Review Final Thoughts
Great Blue has been a personal favourite for many years, even before the HTML5 refresh when it had the ridiculously low RTP. Sure, there are plenty of games around now that can pay just as well as Great Blue, but we just can’t stop going back to it, thinking about what we would do if we got a full screen of dolphins during the bonus round. You would think a slot that is nearly ten years old would have lost its charm by now, yet that is just not the case with Great Blue – it’s as fun as it always was, and we won’t stop playing it until we get that jackpot!
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