Red White Blue 3 Lines Slot Machine
The middle title in Octopus Gaming’s Red White Blue series, Red White Blue 3 Line features the same all-American design as its 1 line cousin but boasts the extra functionality of 3 adjustable paylines.
This means the slot’s interface gets a slight aesthetic overhaul while sticking to the same basic colour concepts, with an extra button added to help players enable and disable active paylines. This also has a bearing on the prize payouts on offer, but we’ll cover that in more detail later in this review.
Despite the slight differences between Red White Blue 3 Line and the 1 line version, the game is essentially still the same and players should have no problem figuring out the rules in a few seconds.
As American As Apple Pie
The 3 payline slot design is one of the most iconic to come out of the bricks and mortar gambling world, and Red White Blue 3 Line faithfully delivers this classic format with the top, middle and bottom rows all awarding prize payouts when certain combinations are matched.
Starting at a minimum of 2x your stake per line for one white seven symbol anywhere on an active payline, these prizes grow to as much as 6,000x your line bet for matching up a row of stars and stripes sevens across the third payline, which runs left-to-right across the bottom of the game.
When all three paylines are active, the chances of you hitting at least the minimum payout are high, but players should note that a single return of 2x your line bet is actually a losing proposition when you’re wagering on all three, so they’ll need to bag something more substantial in order to profit.
Behind BARs
Featuring 3 reels and 3 paylines, you’d expect Red White Blue 3 Lines to be packed with traditional American iconography, but what the game actually serves up is somewhat disappointing. While there would have been a lot of scope to include various pieces of Americana, the game instead relies on BAR logos and lucky sevens and simply alters their design slightly to get its six separate icons.
This means that there’s not a great deal of variety in the appearance of symbols in Red White Blue 3 Lines, with single, double and triple BAR logos filling up the majority of spaces and white, blue and the exceptionally rare stars and stripes sevens occupying the remainder. This makes the game quite unappealing to look at and, despite the bright colours, it doesn’t do much to hold players’ attention.
The audio in the game is, unfortunately, just as basic, with a sound bank of effects taken from classic slot machines simply rehashed for the game and no unique noises added to spice things up a bit.
Seven’s Deadly Sin
While the stars and stripes seven symbols act as a wild and can be substituted for all other regular symbols to complete winning paylines, there is a distinct lack of them on Red White Blue 3 Line’s reels and this renders their impact on your overall winnings fairly minimal.
With all three paylines active, you may occasionally find one of these rare icons, but even that is no guarantee that it will actually arrive at a time where it will complete several paylines as there simply aren’t that many to profit from in the first place. Furthermore, the stars and stripes symbol also acts as the jackpot icon, rendering your chances of ever finding the best three-of-a-kind incredibly small.
To make matters even worse, Red White Blue 3 Lines’ maximum jackpot of 6,000x your line bet is only available on the third payline, so even if you do hit this seemingly once-in-a-lifetime payout, if it’s in the wrong place you could win a significantly smaller 3,000x or even 1,000x your bet instead.
A Flagging Series
While Red White Blue 3 Line does boast greater functionality than Octopus Gaming’s 1 line version, the distribution of symbols on the game’s 3 reels still makes it incredibly difficult to profit from the game’s advertised wild feature. Essentially coming around so rarely as to not make any difference to your overall profits, both the wild symbol and the maximum jackpot it can potentially trigger are little more than window dressing for a game that is incredibly difficult to score big wins on.