The Great Albini Slot Review

The Great Albini is a video slot from Microgaming developed by Foxium with 5 reels and 25 paylines. Released in January 2019, you can play the game in online casinos such as Guts, Mr Green or Maria Casino.

Theme and basic information

The Great Albini gives us a magician theme, it’s not quite magical though it aspires to be. Think late 19th, early 20th century, big stage, an illusionist holding everyone’s attention and a beautiful assistant who helps with the most important tricks. That’s The Great Albini. The magician himself is standing to our left, keeping a close watch on the reels and spinning his staff every once in a while.

The slot looks good. The 3D graphics are well done, though not excellent. Indeed, we’re inclined to say that a little less would have been better here, because the graphics look too ambitious to really work, especially on the small screen. The stage looks great and the floating symbols are well done and detailed, but either you need an exceptionally high resolution on your screen, or the details really do become as pixelated as they appeared on our screen.

The background music fits in well, however, giving us a bit of a magic touch here.

Albini himself is the most valuable symbol, paying out 1,000 coins for a 5-of-a-kind win. Lily pays out 500 coins for such a winning combination. The canary, the knives and the lucky cups pay out 300, 200 and 100 coins, respectively. In addition, you’ll get the card royals from 10 to Ace.

You can play this game from €0.25 to €50, making this a medium-range slot, not quite suitable for high rollers.

Mystery Boxes in the base game

Whenever the Great Albini spins his magician’s staff around, a bonus feature might be added to the base game. A stack of mystery boxes will need to land on the middle reel, covering it entirely. That’s when the Mystery Box Re-spins begin. The mystery boxes are locked in place and during 3 free re-spins, more might be added to the reels. Indeed, nothing but the mystery boxes spin on the reels. Whenever another mystery box lands on the reels, your re-spins will reset to 3. This continues until either no further mystery boxes appear during the next 3 re-spins, or until the reels are filled with nothing but mystery boxes.

Once the re-spins stop, Albini will reveal one random symbol behind all boxes and any wins are paid out according to paylines.

Every so often, Albini might swing his staff and a massive free spin symbol might appear on the reels. If it lands on the reels, it will trigger the free spins. Usually, however, you only see it spin past without it landing.

Lily rules the free spins

You will need three scatters on the three middle reels to activate the free spins. Alternatively, however, you can also buy your way into the free spins.

• 8 free spins are available for 100x your stake
• 10 free spins are available for 125x your stake
• 12 free spins are available for 150x your stake

If you land the free spins with three scatters, you’ll receive 12 free spins right away.

During the free spins, the reels expand to cover 6 rows, giving us 50 paylines. Lily is the main attraction here. If she lands on either of the 3 middle reels, she will expand to cover the whole reel, turn wild and add a 2x multiplier to all wins. You will get a free re-spin to get you started. If you land a winning combination on the free re-spin, you’ll receive another free re-spin. Indeed, as long as you keep getting consecutive wins, free re-spins will be added, and Lily remains locked in place. Once you don’t get any more wins, Lily is removed from the reels once more and the regular free spins continue.

This may happen several times during the free spins, which usually means you’ll play a lot more spins than the initial number you’re getting (whether bought or triggered via scatters).

We’ve experienced wins that were good enough to make it worthwhile to buy the free spins. But there’s no guarantee that it works.

Conclusion: Ambitious slot that almost succeeds

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of The Great Albini is 96.66%, which is excellent value. This is indeed much higher than we get with most Microgaming slots and it makes this a worthwhile game to try out.

Visually, we consider the game a little too ambitious because it doesn’t quite manage to deliver. The gameplay is well done, however. The Mystery Box Re-spins hit often enough to keep the base game interesting and having the option of buying your way into the free spins can be a worthwhile consideration as well. But you need to be lucky for it to work out. We had fun playing The Great Albini, but eventually it was just not that great to keep looking at it and so we moved on to other games with better graphics.