Carnaval Forever Slot Review

Released in February 2019, this slot can be played at online casinos such as Unibet, Mr Green or Guts.

Theme and basic information

Welcome to the carnival in Rio. That’s the theme of the slot. We’re not sure about the spelling ‘carnaval’ here, but the theme is unmistakable regardless.

The rhythms are hot, the beats are making us swing along and the costumes are colourful. This is a fun-looking slot. And as carnival or Mardi Gras slots go, this one is among the beautiful ones.

The wild is the most colourful symbol in the game, looking a bit like a rainbow stage. It pays out 100x our stake for a win of 5 on a payline. The guy with the golden key is worth 75x our stake for such a winning combination. The red and the purple dancers both pay 50x our stake for 5 of a kind, whilst the green and blue dancers each pay 25x our stake.

The remaining symbols are somewhat bland playing card symbols from 10 to A.

The stunning Carnaval Queen is the scatter in this game.

You can play this game from 0.10 to 10.00, which makes it suitable for budget conscious players.

An uneventful base game

This game is all about the free spins. So, unfortunately, there’s isn’t much happening in the base game. You set your bet and start spinning, either automatically or manually. The latter is perhaps the better option, if you want to use the double up feature in case you win.

Here you get to flip a coin and bet on whether it will land on heads or tails. You essentially bet your winnings and get a chance at doubling them up. Or losing all of it. Well, you have to option of gambling 50%, which helps somewhat.

The other things to watch out for random coins landing on the reels. They are added to the “Buy feature”, reducing the total of the price in small increments. If, for instance, you’ve collected enough coins to reduce the price of the feature to 97.60, instead of the original 100.00, you might be more inclined to buy the feature then.

Colourful free spins

The free spins are triggered as long as you spin at least three Carnaval Queens onto the reels. In that case, you will receive 5 free spins. Spin four scatters onto the reels and you’ll receive 7 spins. And five scatters will get you 9 spins.

There’s nothing much special about the free spins, though. You do feel as if the wild symbol shows up slightly more often, though, and you seem to win on almost every spin, even if big wins are rare here. That said, whenever the scatter lands on the reels once again, she will give you 2 more free spins. It seems, this can go on indefinitely, letting you play a lot more free spins than the 5, 7 or 9 you start off with.

Finally, there’s a “Buy feature” option, where you can buy 10 free spins for 100x our stake. Whilst you do get one more free spin than when you collect five scatters (which is incredibly rare anyway), the buy option doesn’t seem worth it. We did try it out just to be able to give you a recommendation here and found that we won only about half of the money we spent on the feature to begin with. Collecting coins to reduce the price also takes a long time and it takes a long time to get the price down to even 95x our stake.

Conclusion: A colourful but surprisingly boring slot

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) for Carnaval Forever is 96.22% in the base game and 96.63%, if you use the “Buy Feature” option. The game is, however, quite volatile and wins tend to be infrequent and rarely big. Especially in the base game, you’ll find it difficult to accrue any big wins. The free spins can be more successful here and on paper you could win 10,848x your stake, which is very impressive.

But getting there might seem to be close to impossible and even with such a winning potential, we ultimately found the slot almost boring. Just spinning away on the reels is simply not for everyone and there’s nothing much happening unless you want to risk a little in the Double Up feature. Beyond that, don’t buy the free spins unless you go for a small stake.