Three wishes, to be exact. And ixnay on the wishing for more wishes. That’s it. Three. Uno, dos, tres. No substitutions, exchanges or refunds.

Genies, mystical symbols and magic are the marks of The Wish Master, another slots game from NetEnt.

This ‘Wild-centric’ slots game is great to watch and fun to play. Unlike many slots out there, it doesn’t inundate you with a plethora features and then only half deliver what was promised; instead it has focused on one element – Wild symbols – and offers a wide range of different variations, and does it very successfully indeed. Like other NetEnt slots, it takes a little longer to load than some other games, but once you see the smooth animations you’ll understand why. Trust me, it’s worth the extra few seconds wait.

With its 5 reels and 20 pay lines, The Wish Master is, in itself, a fairly standard slot game. Gentle twinkly music plays and appropriately bejeweled ‘eastern’ symbols spin and fall into place, and winning lines are displayed with a nicely animated electrical type discharge. Hit several lines and a veritable fireworks display erupts! As you’d expect with any NetEnt title these days the game is polished. It looks wonderful, sounds great and plays smoothly. There’s very little to visually fault this mythical NetEnt offering. The game contains the normal NetEnt UI frame so that all the buttons and options are neatly arranged in a standard format. Nothing is hidden or unclear, but as I start to see more UI implementations from the likes of Quickspin, Thunderkick or some of Odobo’s developer content, where the UI is well themed and stylised, NetEnt’s UI frame is starting to look old and clunky in comparison.

The Wish Master is essentially a single base game with a lot of reel / symbol modifiers that apply once you hit at least 1 scatter, being the magic lamp parchment. Get just one of these scatters on the reel and you’ve unlocked one of a wide range of feature options. The rather gruesome Genie appears and, in a flurry of fiery animation, like something out of a Disney movie, randomly bestows one magical symbol upon you, before popping back into his lamp. These symbols are displayed in the top left of the game and lasts for 10 spins (you can have up to three symbols running at once, and each new symbol will increase the feature spin counter by a further 5 spins). Interestingly though, this is not a free spins mode. These are standard line bets so even though you should expect a bigger pay-out from the matches, you’re still paying the bet which makes it a really interesting mechanic. The available modifications are:

• Extra Wild – Where either of the top two paying symbols being a mauve gem and a brown jewel helmet (I think) transform into a standard line wild symbol.

• Expanding Wilds – When a regular Wild appears on any of the reels, it expands to cover the entire reel, essentially giving you a wild reel but not on any fixed reel during the ‘bonus’ session.

• Wild Reel – The whole reel on which the Genie’s Scatter Symbol first appeared is turned into Wilds. This remains in place for the duration of the 10 spins on the same reel.

• Random Wilds – On each spin of the 10, two new wilds appear in a random place on the game window.

• Multipliers – The Genie bestows multipliers that, surprise, surprise, multiply your winnings by 2x or 3x time that listed in the paytable.

If you originally triggered more than one magic lamp parchment symbol then you’ll get 2 simultaneous modifications and if you land another scatter during the 10 spins, again you’ll get a second modification and the 10 spins resets; up to a total of 3 active modifications. It is here that the bonus starts to get meaty, especially if you happen to get the Random Wilds with a 3x multiplier.

As the game progressed through I felt like the scatter was dropping ever 60 or so turns and the pay-outs were mostly to the lower end. It probably would have been better to push that hit frequency out a little and put a bit more RTP in bonus/modification sequences. For instance the wild reel dropped 3 times for me and each time on the fifth reel (doh!), which makes me think the modifications are weighted depending on the reel the symbol drops. This is fine but not so that it’s heavily weighted and I receive the same outcome three times in a row. But this is a minor grumbling.

Overall It’s a fun, highly animated game with a nice set of bonuses or not as the case may be.
Returns on this slot were not as frequent as other games we’ve tested and as a player who likes ‘waiting for the big win’ is favourable, but question if there is enough here to hold the attention of players until that win occurs.