This is an odd looking game with a mass of buttons and controls contributing to a somewhat cluttered user interface, but I’ve come to expect this kind of hurried presentation from EGT and their pokies by now.
Rich World is a progressive pokie which is supposed to represent everything “rich” and classy, but the combination of bank symbols, gold credit cards and “richest man in the world” wilds all combines to form a tacky looking game that really didn’t entice me to invest money in playing it.
Casting my doubts about the look of the game aside, I set about finding out if there was more to Rich World than meets the eye.
About The Developer
Euro Games Technology or EGT was founded in 2002, but I didn’t actually see any of their games available for play online until around two years ago.
I’m unsure if that is just because of my location, as the company is based in Bulgaria and it seems likely that they will have had a strong presence in the online casino market of their home country long before their games became more widely available.
The company has a large portfolio of gaming products including pokie machine cabinets, electronic roulette/blackjack tables, and jackpot systems, in addition to their online operations.
One unusual thing I have noticed about EGT is their apparent fixation with dice based pokie machines – at least a quarter of their back catalog uses dice as the primary symbols on the reels, and many of those games have very little in the way of additional features to distance themselves from one another.
The sheer number of these games would suggest that somebody at EGT really likes the idea of seeing dice on the reels, but I can’t for the life of me fathom why they have produced so many of these largely identical and uninspiring machines!
How To Play
There really wouldn’t be that much wrong with the user interface used by Rich World if it wasn’t for the fact that almost every player will have seen a thousand pokie control panels that were much more eloquent and user-friendly in their design.
For example, at the left and right-hand sides of the reels are five buttons which allow you to choose to play varying numbers of pay lines – but only the specific numbers the designers have decided you might wish to play.
More importantly, it took me a minute or two to even work out how to spin the reels the first time I played an EGT pokie machine. That’s a massive usability issue right there, and one that should surely have been picked up during the testing phase?
Whereas in most games the various options for choosing your bet size serve no additional function, in this game clicking one of the five bet sizes actually spins the reels as well. This makes it very quick to vary the size of your stake from one spin to the next, but could easily confuse players who aren’t familiar with this setup.
Once you’ve got used to the unusual interface then it does at least work perfectly well, but would it really hurt EGT so badly to comply with accepted convention when designing their pokie machines?
Special Features
The main bonus in Rich World is a free spins feature which awards 15, 20 or 25 free spins for 3, 4 or 5 scatters respectively.
The free spins can also be retriggered, and even just two scatters will award you an additional five free spins. Unfortunately as with most games, an alternative set of reel strips are used during the free spins, and two scatters doesn’t seem to appear anywhere near as often as during the base game.
On the plus side, the alternate reel strips used in the feature also have stacked wilds added to the second, third, and fourth reels, which dramatically increases your chances of winning on a large number of pay lines simultaneously.
Payouts
I was very pleasantly surprised by the paytable offered by Rich World. Whilst there isn’t any specific paytable allocation for the wild symbol, the next symbol down – the lady – pays a full 200x your stake for a full line of five-of-a-kind.
During the free spins its possible to score several of these top-paying combinations at once, and I would take a guess that the maximum jackpot spin in this game is somewhere around 2,000x your stake.
Five scatters also returns a cash prize of 200x your stake on top of awarding the feature, and even the prizes for the lower paying symbols are somewhat better than I have come to expect from a 25 pay line game.
Summary
The better than average paytable is a major plus for Rich World, and might even save it from being a totally forgettable game.
This pokie is certainly a little rough around the edges, and EGT would surely be well advised to spend a little time researching the latest releases from their competitors – they could improve so many things so easily, it’s hard to understand why they have yet to do so.
If you can look past the below average presentation then Rich World has plenty of potential for big wins, and that is surely the most important thing when choosing an online pokie.
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