Space Wars

Space Wars might remind you of a certain famous franchise due to the similar title, but this game has a much more non-serious and humorous approach to the space/alien theme than Star Wars ever did. The reels are filled with rather cute looking space creatures, and what exactly the war is about is not all that clear. Perhaps it’s the highest value crystal symbol, or maybe the extra-terrestrials just like to fight amongst themselves like we earthlings tend to do.
Whatever it is, it plays out on an invisible reel set of 5 reels, 4 rows and 40 fixed ways to win. The paylines are listed up by numbers on both sides, which is the only reel frame you have here. The game is set in non-gravity space, with an asteroid belt and a big planet in the background. You can place bets between 40p and £200 per spin across all platforms and devices, and this means that mobile, tablet and desktop/laptop play works equally fine (despite this being a somewhat dated title from NetEnt).
When it comes to bonus features, the usual stuff you might expect from this developer is nowhere to be found. This is not exactly a feature heavy game to put it mildly, and it centers around the sole Cloning Pod Respins feature. You get a respin after every win, and the winning symbols are cloned and returned to the reels as stacks of symbols. This can lead to bigger wins, but keep in mind that the max win is only 1,000x your stake in Space Wars slot. This is not a very solid potential for a medium variance title, and you can see how it went with our 200 first spins in the video highlights further down in the review.
If you were expecting tons of different features you might be in for a disappointment here. The game is rather simple when it comes to extras, but you do have a wild symbol that can step in for all regular symbols. However, the wilds can only land on reels 2 and 4, but many times the wilds will land in stacks.
This is also the case with regular symbols, and this is especially true when you trigger the Cloning Pod Respins feature. This is the main feature in the game, and it’s triggered after every single win. The cloning pod looks like a baby’s feeding bottle, and can be seen on the right-hand side.
The winning symbol shows up in this Cloning Pod, and the same number of them that you won with is then put onto the reels in the free Respin that follows. Unfortunately, the feature does not continue if you win on the Cloning Respin, and instead you go back to regular paid spins again.
Space Wars does not come with any kind of free spins bonus round. Everything is centered around the Cloning Pod Respins here. This might be a bit of a downer for some players, and to be honest, the Respins feature would have been much better if the process continued as long as you kept landing new winners.
The interface in Space Wars slot looks like the dashboard of a UFO or intergalactic spaceship. NetEnt has done a nice job with that, and here we will walk you through everything you need to know about how to play this game. If you have plenty of experience with NetEnt titles, you might wanna skim through this part, but newbies should probably pay attention.
The small wrench icon down in the left-hand side corner opens up the game settings for you. Here you can turn off the intro splash screen the next time you load the game, which saves you a bit of time. You can also turn on the Quick Spin feature for increased pace, and decide if you want to use the spacebar to spin.
The volume can be adjusted seamlessly within the game here, which is always a plus, and you can open up the paytable and info section via the “i” button. The first 2 slides will tell you briefly about the game features, and the illustrations might help clarify things even more for you. The paytable is found on the third and fourth slide, and it’s a static paytable that does not update according to your chosen bet level.
Instead, you’ll see symbol values based on a single line win, which means that you need to divide the numbers by the 40 fixed paylines to see how much each combination is worth per total stake. The red crystal thing is the most valuable symbol here, followed by 10 different alien creatures. The payout ranges from 25x to 3.12x your stake for 5 of the premiums, while the 5 lower value aliens on a payline have a value that ranges from 1.5x to 1x.
You need to land 3 to 5 matching symbols on a payline to win, and the bet line wins pay from the uttermost left to the right. You will only get paid for the highest win per bet line, but multiple bet line wins are added together. You have 10 bet levels to choose from, and coin values from 0.01 to 0.50. This gives you a bet range from 40p to £200 per spin, which should suit most players out there.
Finally, you can set up the autoplay feature with between 10 and 1,000 autospins. You also have advanced options as to how to stop the feature. You can stop it on any win, if a single win exceeds a chosen level or if your bankroll goes above or below a chosen level. Of course, you can also spin the reels manually – the old school way.
NetEnt is the most famous and popular slot developer out there, and their games are always in high demand. Space Wars might be a bit dated at this time, but it’s still going strong. You can therefore find it in many different quality casinos, and below we will present you with your best options for how to proceed from here.
This is far from a complicated game in any way, and reading the above is probably enough for you to get the gist of it. You spin the reels and you get a free respin with cloned symbols after every win. That’s really the essence of this game, and if you like the sound of that you can check out our selection of casinos where you canplay Space Wars slotwith a sweet welcome bonus. Simply follow the link to the top of the page, and you can get started right away.
The game might be simple, but it’s also a bit unusual. Not everyone will like the fact that you get no bonus round, or that the only real feature is the cloned symbols respin. However, you never really know until you’ve tried. This is exactly why we have thefree Space Wars demo gameinstalled at the very top of this page for you. Follow the link up there, and click the “play for free” button to get started right away.
The problem with games without a bonus round is that there is nothing to look forward to. As much as we like NetEnt, we believe they’ve made a mistake by dropping a free spins feature in Space Wars. It would have made things that more interesting, but it is what it is. We still looked forward to our 200 spins test session, even though only mediocre wins are possible here.
We decided to play it safe, and go with a low bet level of 80p per spin. This was a wise choice as it turned out, because our session was pretty much uneventful. You can check out how it went in our video, or read about it below, but there is not very much to report to be brutally honest.
We had nothing but dead spins for a while, until we landed a full stack of wilds on the second reel. This gave us a “whopping” win of less than 1x our stake, and it’s almost embarrassing to write about this as some kind of highlight. The green scared looking alien got cloned, but we won exactly nothing, zip, zero on the free respin that followed.
After some more dead spins, the stacked wilds once again came to our rescue. That is, if you can call a less than 1x win any kind of a “rescue”. Once again, the cloned respin gave us nothing, and the feature really started to annoy us at this point. Not long after the same story repeated itself, but this time the cloned respin gave us a 2x win, or so, which was still lousy.
Our biggest win came a few dead spins later, as we cloned the third most valuable symbol. This landed us a total win of 7.87x our stake, including the cloned respin. We had a few more insignificant wins after this, but the cloned respins was a big let down in our session. We can say right now that we will not be back for another go, but feel free to give it a shot and see if you have better luck than we did.
Space Wars is a bit of a disappointment from NetEnt to be honest, but then again we are writing this review in 2020. This game is far from their latest creation, but even back in 2013, when this game was released, NetEnt was a world leading slot provider. Space Wars could have been so much better with a few simple adjustments, and it just come across as too boring and uneventful to live up to what we expect from this developer.
A bonus round would have gone a long way here, and so would a higher potential than 1,000x your stake. The cloned respins feature is cleverly done, but too many times it leads to nothing. If the respins kept going as long as you landed winners, and perhaps with a progressive multiplier thrown into the mix, things could have gotten interesting. As it stands however, there is just nothing much to look forward to when you play this game.
Pros
Cons
If you like games with aspace/alien theme, we have 395 such slots in our catalog at the time of writing. The number one, of course, is Starburst, but below we’ll present you with some interesting alternatives to the game at hand. You can read more about each game by following the respective links, and also check out the free demo version of each game if you want.
Energoonz- is a 5×5 grid slot from Play’n Go, and it comes with a cascading wins multiplier that goes up to 10x. This makes the gameplay a lot more exciting than what the game at hand has to offer, and you will also get a 1,000x bonus win if you clear the whole grid of symbols. There is a bonus round too here, with up to 20 free spins, so this is really a good alternative if you like non-serious alien themed games.
Galactic Girls- takes you into space with a bunch of 1950s pin-up girls (hence the title). You will assist these beauties in saving the world from an alien invasion, and it all plays out on a 5×6 grid with 7,776 ways to win. The bonus round offers 10 free spins, and you will benefit from fully stacked girls on the reels in this feature. There are plenty of other modifiers too, including up to 100x multipliers for massive wins.
Reactoonz- is another space alien themed grid slot from Play’n Go, and this one plays out on a 7×7 grid. The cascading wins feature means plenty of base game action, and each consecutive win charges a bonus meter that can trigger 5 different Quantum features. This includes massive wilds up to 3×3, and Reactoonz is a highly volatile game with a max win of 4,750x your stake.