Reel Star: Slot Overview

As the Reel Star game sheet puts it, ‘Find out if you have what it takes to become a Reel Star!‘ Once upon a time, becoming a star usually meant you had to excel at something. These days, it can seem like fame is sometimes achieved simply by being famous, building an online ‘brand’, or doing something wild or amusing enough to rack up clicks. The internet has clearly played a huge role in that shift. But if the road to stardom is opened up to more people, does that also water down what it means to be a celebrity? Something to chew on.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings us to Reel Star, a video slot from Relax Gaming created exclusively for Unibet and 32 Red. It’s a fairly traditional title packed with classic slot imagery, though it does sprinkle in a few modern touches. The overall feel is a little odd if you think too hard about it: Reel Star comes across as both lively and relaxed, like it can’t decide between heading to the main room for a dance or slipping off to the chill-out area for a breather. The studio calls it ‘classic retro style with a modern twist’, and that description is pretty spot on.

If you can access Reel Star, you can play it on any device, with stakes ranging from 10 p/c to $/€100 per spin. Do keep an eye out for alternative RTP versions, where the top return is 96%. The volatility is high, scored at 5 out of 5, so that’s another key point to note. The action unfolds on a 5-reel, 3-row layout, using 15 fixed lines for payouts. Land at least three matching symbols on a payline from the left across adjacent reels, and it’s a win.

Reel Star uses six standard paying symbols. From lowest to highest, they are bells, horseshoes, clovers, pink gems, crowns, and spectacled piggies. In terms of payouts, a five-of-a-kind result pays 2.5 to 15 times the stake. Wild combinations can pay more—up to 50x the bet for five wild symbol—and wilds can also substitute for any of the six regular paying symbols listed above.

Reel Star: Slot Features

Next up is more of the modern, twisty side of things, including the Ladder Up and Upgrade feature, plus free spins featuring multipliers and roaming wilds.

Ladder Up and Upgrade Feature

In the base game, Star symbols and Upgrade symbols can appear on all reels. Landing 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 Stars pays 1x, 3x, 15x, 50x, or 250x the bet, respectively. Each Upgrade symbol on the screen doubles the Star payout. So, for instance, hitting 2 x Stars along with 1 Upgrade symbol would return 6x the bet. It is possible to land 5 Upgrade symbols with 5 Star symbols.

Free Spins

Scatters appear on reels 2, 3, and 4. Landing 3 of them activates the free spins feature. Before it starts, a package of free spins, multiplier, and moving wilds is randomly generated. You can be awarded 5, 7, 8, 10, 12, or 15 free spins, a multiplier of x1, x2, x3, x4, or x5, and 2, 3, 4, 5, or 7 moving wilds. During free spins, regular wilds, scatters, or upgrade symbols are removed from the reels. On each spin, the moving wilds move to random positions on the reels.

Reel Star: Slot Verdict

Along with perhaps needing a touch of imagination to feel like a star while spinning Reel Star, players will also need to stick with 32 Red or Unibet, as Reel Star was produced exclusively for these operators. Perhaps because the game is naturally aimed at a narrower audience, the studio hasn’t gone all-in on an especially elaborate theme. To illustrate, compare it with the previous Relax Gaming slot we reviewed, Grim The Splitter.

That said, it’s not entirely fair to pit those two against each other, since it’s unlikely Relax Gaming was aiming to unsettle anyone with this exclusive. Instead, it leans into a retro approach while appealing to a very specific crowd that enjoys this style of game. Reel Star keeps things straightforward and upbeat, yet it can still deliver hefty single-spin base game hits thanks to Upgrade symbols doubling the Star payout. In the ideal scenario, landing five Stars plus five Upgrades would pay 8,000x the bet – 250x for the Star payout doubled five times. In a way, free spins can feel like a pause from the main attraction, because any individual base game spin can technically be the one that unlocks Reel Star’s full potential. It would have been helpful to have the max win frequency so players could see the whole picture, but that information wasn’t available during the review.

On the flip side, as Han Solo said to C3-PO in Empire Strikes Back before taking the Millennium Falcon into an asteroid field, some people would rather not know the odds. Reel Star probably isn’t the kind of spectacle players will travel far and wide to hunt down, but if it’s available and a funky retro title from a top-tier developer is on offer, it might be exactly what the doctor ordered.