A couple of weeks ago I had some free slot play at Sam’s Town and decided to try IGT’s Moonwalker.
I’d been reluctant to try it because it had 50 pay lines with an added 10¢ side bet to enable the feature. But I was playing on the casino’s dime so I gave it a shot.
I got a couple of good pays right away and then triggered the Moonwalker feature. I had only put $10 of my own money in the game and walked away with $54. Great!
Then I saw the game at Sunset Station and decide to put $20 in to see what would happen. I got down to $4.35 and put in another $5. On the next spin I got the Moonwalker feature and won $67.34; so I cashed out $64.41.
This week I tried Moonwalker at the Emerald Isles in Henderson. I started with $30 and got the free spin bonus almost right away. The result was a $17 profit, but then the pay slacked off. I got down to $11 and was almost ready to cash out when the Moonwalker feature triggered. It paid $33.41.
So I kept on playing and just a few spins later triggered Moonwalker again. This time I won $91.10. I had $127 and, although tempted to keep playing, I cashed out.
The regular play on this machine is very slow to pay, even most of the five-of-a-kinds that pay 100 credits. Since there are so many lines it usually pays on more than one line. At one credit per line it doesn’t add up very fast. The most I got on a spin not during a bonus was $12.
You need to get into one of the features to come out ahead in this game. I think this is one of those games that requires more than a $20 investment (at least $30) to keep you going until a feature is triggered, and you have to be willing to go below the $20 loss level.
That’s something I don’t usually do, but I found the feature pays were worth the risk.
The IGT Moonwalker slot theme is based on America’s first lunar landing. It features the lunar landing capsule, the land rover, the American flag, a picture of the first footprint in the lunar soil, the lunar patch symbol and, of course, a close up of the helmeted astronaut, which is a wild symbol for everything except the scatter moon.
Three moon symbols trigger the free game feature.
You get 15 free spins at 3x the pay and you can retrigger for more free spins or trigger the Moonwalker bonus.
If you have paid the side bet, when an astronaut appears on both the first and fifth reel the Moonwalker feature is triggered. The astronaut expands to turn the entire reel wild. As he walks across the screen and, instead of the usual “music and bells,” you hear the radio chatter from the actual lunar landing. The astronaut stops on each reel where all pay lines are re-evaluated.
