Love Lines Slots
Well, well, what have we here? Love Lines is a game by Australian software development company Eyecon and it’s one you’re going to either enjoy as a guilty pleasure or outright despise. The company makes slots and other gambling games, and Love Lines falls firmly into the ‘other’ category.
If you like the idea of wagering your money but find the prospect of video slots too daunting – an unlikely proposition, but let’s run with it just for the sake of argument – Love Lines might be the game for you.
There’s a lot to hate about Love Lines, but it’s got this much in its favour: it’s easy to play. Like, hella easy. This is a game that a child could master, were it not for the fact that Love Lines is a gambling game and thus not suitable for minors. Oh well, grown-ups, seems this one’s all for you. Forget rolling reels or activating free spins: Love Lines involves no such frippery. This is stripped back gaming, with no bells and whistles, just a 3x3 grid where the action unfolds.
Lines for Pleasure, or Lines for Punishment?
We’ll delve into the game’s shortcomings in due course, but first let’s highlight its plus points, or what there are of them at least. The game promises a return to player ratio of a pretty respectable 95.64%. The maximum amount you can win per game is 10,000. That’s the good news.
With persistence, you stand as good a chance of winning a big prize here as you do playing any HD slot, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how you win the money, so long as you win, right?
There are some players who will demur with this ethos. For some players, winning is important but so’s having fun, and if you’re thinking of hitting up Love Lines for the sheer unadulterated enjoyment of it, good luck, cos fun is thin on the ground.
It’s not the simplicity of the game that’s the issue, as slots are scarcely any more complex. And it’s not the sound effects that drag it down either, naff as they are. Thanks to the wonder that is the mute button, you can silence Love Lines and crank up your favourite tunes while you play.
No, the trouble with this game – its biggest, most glaring fault – is that to play it, you’re forced to look at it, and that is a fate that no gamer should have to suffer.
Love Is Blind
While the action unfolds on the 3x3 grid to the right of the screen, to the left a trio of cupids frolic merrily, their wings-a-flapping and their golden hair sparkling in unison with their golden robes. In the background, a sea of fluffy blue clouds float gently across the sky. It all sounds so blissful and angelic, were it not for the expressions on their gormless faces and, come to think of it, everything else about the scene. Eyecon might be proficient coders, but their games certainly aren’t eye candy, that’s for sure.
It’s a similar story when it comes to the gaming symbols that surface on the red grid. There’s nothing particularly wrong with the items they depict, cliched as they are: a love letter, a pair of Love Hearts sweets, a silhouette of a couple kissing in a love heart and a bottle of champagne.
No, the problem once again is how they’re rendered: this is as loveless and gormless a design as you’re likely to encounter, and that includes the games released by some of the more ‘interesting’ Eastern European software houses.
Make Some Scratch
Love Lines is designed to resemble a scratch card, the sort you would typically apply a coin to, scratching off the silver patina to reveal whether you’ve matched three symbols. The aim of the game is to match 3 golden hearts in a row. Achieve that and you’ll win the prize value shown. This is determined by the value of the stake you’ve set, which can range from 0.1 to 10. Press Start Game and then Reveal All to determine whether you’ve won a prize.
Alternatively, if you enjoy the suspense, you can manually click to reveal each of the 9 squares in turn. And that’s all there is to Love Lines: Start, Reveal, Start again, repeat until you can’t stomach the garish graphics and smoochy soundtrack any more. It ain’t pretty, but it works.
