Catwalk is a bright and attractive looking game, with the one-hundred lines it boasts suggestive of one that is filled with possibilities. Don’t fall for the looks without reading our in-depth review first, however.
Special Features
There are two main features of the game other than the sheer number of lines that are in play, so have a read of how they both work here before you get stuck into the game itself.
Sky Scraper Wilds
There’s a Wild function at play in Catwalk, so keep your eye out for the symbol that looks like a Sky Scraper with ‘Wild’ printed across the front of it in art deco writing. They will substitute in for any symbol apart from Scatters, with two Wilds appearing on the same reel resulting in them expanding to make the entire reel turn into Wilds. That will, in turn, increase the chance of you hitting multiple winning lines on the rest of the game board.
Hat Box Bonus Scatters
There’s a Bonus Round in play during Catwalk, which is triggered by landing three, four or five Hat Box Scatter symbols pictured here with a bright pink bow! They pay out on their own accord too, of course, which is worth drawing your attention to.
Boutique Bonus Round
Landing three, four or five Hat Boxes will see you receive some winnings, but far more important is the fact that it will kick-start the Boutique Bonus Round. The number of Scatters that landed on your reels will determine how many goes of the Bonus Round you get to have.
The Bonus Round itself involves you looking in the window of a Boutique, selecting gifts. Each gift will have a cash prize associated with it, so if you get three Scatters you’ll be able to choose three gifts, four will mean four gifts and five will mean that you can select five gifts.
Gameplay & RTP
Catwalk is quite an intriguing game if you’ve played much else on the Virtue Fusion network, mainly because of how plush it looks. You’ve got to hand it to the creators that they’ve made a game that has graphics and a general feel that fits in with the overall theme, given that the whole thing seems to be quite decadent. The colours scheme is made up of royal purple and different shades of pink, with the purples restricted to the areas at the side of the reels. Those sides are filled with images of New York, including a Madison Avenue street sign, another sign from 57th Street and a Walk / Don’t Walk crossing indicator. The pinks, meanwhile, make up the line numbers, as well as the buttons for the ‘Info’, ‘Play’ and other controls. There are other colours in the reels, such as a light blue and a rich burgundy for some of the other symbols that you can land on your reels. It might seem a bit much to be talking so in-depth about colours, but it’s a good indication of how rich the game itself feels.
You’ll likely be far more interested in how the thing plays, of course. On that front there’s not much to complain about either. The game is quite graphics heavy, but under-the-hood enhancements mean that those graphics don’t weigh it down at all. The reels spin quickly and smoothly, lacking any of the blurriness you can often spot on less powerful or modern creations. The Boutique Bonus Round fits in perfectly with the theme and, by allowing you to choose the gifts that you’re going to take away in order to reveal the money associated with them, it’s nice and interactive. If you wanted to make a complaint about how it plays then you could maybe point to the fact that there are one-hundred lines and the notion that it’s quite difficult to follow what’s going on or what the chances are of your spin resulting in a winning combination. That said, the majority of players of slot games probably don’t keep all that close of an eye on the lines and just discover at the end whether they’re winners or not, so this might not bother you.
One thing that probably will bother a good amount of you is the poor Return To Player average of Catwalk. 92% is a good way off the more common average of about 92% on slot games and it’s a disappointing distance off the 98% we reckon is the magic number you should be looking out for. We’ve always said that an RTP shouldn’t influence your decision to play a slot as much as the gameplay itself, but on this occasion it’s definitely an influential factor. That’s mainly because the game always plays with all one-hundred lines and has a minimum stake of 1p, meaning that it costs £1 per spin. That’s not too bad if you’re going to see a decent chunk of it coming back to you, but when you’re not it suddenly becomes an expensive slot to play for very long. That’s down to personal preference, of course, and there’s no denying that the gameplay is a pleasurable experience. Perhaps give it a couple of goes and see what you make of it? Win a few times and you’ll soon forget all about the disappointing RTP average.
