Empire Fortune Slot Review

Empire Fortune is a progressive slot from Yggdrasil Gaming with 5 reels and 20 paylines. This slot features three progessive jackpots with the biggest jackpot reaching 7-figure sums. You can play this slot at online casinos such as YoYo, Casino Heroes or Spinit.

Theme and basic information

Empire Fortune comes with a theme of opulence and riches. Large gems feature on the reels and even the card suit symbols look like precious gems. The reels are framed in gold and the orchestral background sound adds to the feel of richness. It’s a pretty slot, graphically well done as all Yggdrasil Gaming slot are, but nothing overly sophisticated.

The red gem is the most valuable symbol, giving us 2,500 coins in a 5-of-kind win. The purple gem pays out 2,000 coins for such a winning combination and the green gem 1,500 coins. The blue gem is still worth 1,000 coins for five of its kind.

The card suit symbols follow with 250 to 500 coins.

Incidentally, there are no wild symbols in this game. We do get the Faberge egg as the bonus symbol and the Free Spins Joker to activate the free spins.

Base game

The base game in Empire Fortune comes with one significant feature that can help you get to the bonus round or the free spins. The Hold feature. Whenever two bonus symbols or two free spin symbols have made it onto the reels, they’ll be held for another spin, which allows for a second chance to get either at least one more bonus symbol or another free spin symbol.

You will see the Hold feature frequently, but it will rarely lead to success. Still, there’s hope. Beyond that, you will simply keep spinning in hopes to reach the bonus features.

You can play Empire Fortune from as little as €0.20 per spin to as much as €100 per spin.

Bonus features

There are two features to look out for in this slot. The bonus game, where you can win coins, mystery prizes, free spins and the jackpots. And the free spin features, where you can get up to 30 spins and a 10x multiplier.

You need three Joker symbols to get 10 free spins with a 2x multiplier. With four Jokers you’ll get 20 free spins and a 4x multiplier on all wins. And if you get five Jokers, you’ll receive 30 free spins and a 10x multiplier. The free spins can be retriggered, which is not too difficult, because you also get the Hold feature here. Whenever that happens, you will automatically receive 1 more spin anyway. And if you do retrigger the free spins, the new set of free spins will be played out after the current one finishes.

Then there is the bonus game, which you trigger with at least three Faberge eggs. When that happens, a large egg will show up on a different screen and you’ll be looking at a three-tier pyramid. Each level will offer different prizes:

• The arrow to climb to the next level and potentially bigger prizes
• Coin prizes between 4 and 250 times your stake
• Coin prizes between 2 and 50 times your stake with a re-spin
• 10 to 30 free spins with a multiplier between 2 and 10x
• Mystery win prizes between 25 and 500 times your stake
• The Gold, Diamond or Empire jackpots
• Access to the Fireworks feature

The Fireworks feature will blast between 3 and 12 rockets onto the levels and award the prizes as they are hit. That includes each of the jackpots.

By the way, if you trigger the bonus feature with four eggs, you will automatically land on the second level, where you can grab the Diamond jackpot or bigger coin wins. And if you trigger it with five eggs, you’ll arrive on the third level right away, getting you that much closer to the Empire jackpot.

Conclusion: An opulent slot with hit-and-miss features

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of Empire Fortune is 94.3%. That’s below average for most video slots but pretty average for most progressive slots, which all tend to be around 94%, sometimes less than that. There is much to like about Empire Fortune. All in all, the features are well thought out and we love the Hold feature, which is generally required to activate one of the features.

But we found that those same features don’t necessarily hold what they promise. On our first try, we didn’t get the free spins once whilst playing 400 rounds of the game. On the second try we not only got them after only 40 spins, but we managed to retrigger them twice, playing a total of 32 spins. That still didn’t yield more than 50x our stake in wins, however, which is not a lot.

The bonus feature makes an appearance much more frequently and we did trigger it with four eggs more than once as well. On average you can expect to see it every 50 spins. But if you only get between 40 and 100 coins each time, it’s somewhat lacking in its delivery. We never once saw the fireworks, for instance.

So, the features may hit frequently enough, but they miss in their delivery, which is a bit of a shame. Perhaps it would have been better to go simpler here, and stick with the main draw of those three progressive jackpots.