Narcos Slot Review
Narcos – one of the greatest TV shows of all time? Possibly. The slot game? Hmm, we’re not so sure this will go down in the record books. The Narcos slot is a new release from NetEnt featuring 243 pay lines, 2 bonus features and a pretty cool Grand Theft Auto kind of vibe.
Is Narcos a hit or a miss for NetEnt?
Narcos opened up to quite the fanfare, it was a hotly anticipated release from gaming giants NetEnt and early indications looked like they would be dealing with a smash hit. Themed on one of the most popular TV shows from recent years, all the ingredients seemed to be there for a truly great slot. The cartoon/Grand Theft Auto styled graphics really lend themselves well to this genre of slot, the graphics are perfect for the theme and the whole slot is just visually a triumph.
A medium variance game, Narcos has 243 pay lines and a typical 5 x 3 reel layout. Nothing out of the ordinary here, and it’s here where we feel the slot just falls down slightly – there’s nothing new going on, everything about the game feels a little bit ‘seen it all before’. Narcos has a max win potential of 1,506 times your stake which is quite good, however, for the most part, wins in this game are underwhelming and disappointing.
Narcos has an in-game feature which is called Drive-By, a car comes along and fires at the reels, all premium character symbols then spin and have a chance to turn into wilds which could lead to big wins because there’s always a good number of character symbols on the reels – however, it rarely turns more than 1 or if you’re lucky 2 into wilds so it’s usually disappointing. Narcos also features Walking Wilds both in the main game and the free spins round, Wilds that form part of a win stay on the reels and shift horizontally one place to the left with each spin.
Screenshots
Locked Up Feature
This feature is triggered by landing 3 Pablo Escobar symbols on the same row in the base game. During the Locked Up feature, only Locked Up and Golden Locked up Symbols will appear on the reels. 3 or more connected Locked Up symbols form a winning cluster. When a Locked Up symbol lands adjacent to a winning cluster, a random coin win value of between 1-10x your bet is awarded. All spins are free in this game.
During the Locked Up feature, when a Golden Locked Up symbol is connected to a winning cluster you can get one of 3 features unlocked:
- Multiplier – All values in the cluster are multiplied by x2 or x3
- Upgrade Symbols – Multiple upgrade values in increments of 1 times the total bet can be assigned to symbols in the same cluster, this can happen 7-15 times each time the feature is activated
- Big starting value – an additional value is added to the Golden Locked Up Symbol
Free Spins Feature
This feature is triggered by landing a Free Spins symbol on reels 1, 3 and 5 at the same time. This will give you 10 free spins. In free spins every spin has the chance that one or more high value symbols will turn into walking wilds. At the end of the round, if there are walking wilds still left on the reels extra free spins are awarded until none remain.
The most frustrating thing about this feature is that you feel like you have a 50/50 chance of the symbol turning wild but they just never seem to, it feels incredibly pre-determined – you can have 7 or 8 symbols with the potential of turning wild and just one will.
Pros / Cons
- Visually a great looking slot
- Fans of the show will enjoy the slot
- A good slot for wagering
- Relatively low win potential and features are often underwhelming
- Gets boring quite quickly
Narcos isn’t a bad slot, it’s just not a GREAT slot. It’s a good slot for wagering, but you won’t be walking away from this one with huge wins very often and it will likely fall out of favour with players quite quickly due to the low wins and often frustrating gameplay.
See all slot reviews.
