Andrej’s been around since day one. Let’s just say that he could get around an online casino blindfolded. That’s not to say that he does, he’s a perfectionist at heart. Fine print? There is none with Andrej.
When it comes to licensed slots, they can be a mixed bag. Some are great, some are terrible, most are just… okay. Bally, however, have managed to turn Cirque Du Soleil, the international group of dancers and acrobats, into a phenomenal slot with Cirque Du Soleil Kooza.
From the captivating audio-visuals to the wide variety of innovative bonus features, there’s a lot to love here. To find out more, continue reading our Cirque Du Soleil Kooza slot review below!
Cirque du Soleil Kooza Details | |
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House Edge: 4.00% | Return to player: 96.00% |
Autospin: Yes | Softwares: no download - instant play, mobile, Mac |
Released: September 29, 2015 | Min Bet: 0.2 |
Max Bet: 400 | Scatters: Yes |
Gamble: No | Max Coins: 40 |
Reels: 5 | Paylines: 40 |
Spins: Yes | Bonus Rounds: Yes |
Wild: Yes | Software: Bally Technologies |
Cirque du Soleil Kooza comparison | ||
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Cirque du Soleil Kooza | AVG | |
Rating: | 4.0 | 4.5 |
House Edge: | 4.00 % | 4.02 % |
Return to player: | 96.00 % | 95.98 % |
Paylines: | 40 | 20.0 |
Bonus Features: | 4 | 3.8 |
Bally’s Cirque Du Soleil Kooza slot is played over 5 reels and 4 rows, and features 40 paylines. Winning lines go from left to right, and symbols need to be connected either horizontally or diagonally, meaning gaps are the enemy here.
This slot can be played by wagering between £0.20 and £1.00 per spin, and features a jackpot of 1000x your stake. The autospin feature can be configured to up to 200 spins, allowing you to sit back and let the game do its thing.
The Cirque Du Soleil Kooza online slot game by Bally has an RTP of 96%, which puts it just above the global average. In addition, it’s a medium volatility slot. Throughout our time testing Cirque Du Soleil Kooza we found ourselves winning between 30x and 60x our stake regularly thanks to the game’s bonus features.
When you think “Cirque Du Soleil”, you don’t think “understated” or “subtle”, and Cirque Du Soleil Kooza is certainly on-brand for the international performing group. This online slot game is nothing if not colourful. It looks like what you’d get if you asked Liberace to design a slot game, and while it won’t win any awards for its audiovisuals, we kind of love it.
The game’s titular character, Kooza, looks like a cross between a circus performer and a sleep-paralysis demon, which adds a decent amount of character to the game. The rest of the character symbols also have that same campy-yet-creepy vibe to them, which really does capture the insane energy of the Cirque Du Soleil brand.
If this were any other slot, we’d probably not like the soundtrack very much. It’s very reminiscent of 90’s Vegas performances, but as part and parcel of the Cirque Du Soleil Kooza slot, it just works. The sound effects of the reels spinning, of winning paylines, and bonus features all work well with the overall look and feel of this slot, and we wouldn’t change a thing.
The low-paying symbols in Cirque Du Soleil Kooza are your standard fare of playing card symbols (Queen, King, and Ace) as well as two masquerade masks (a masculine one, and a feminine one). The two masquerade masks are each quite distinctive, making it extremely easy to differentiate between them, even when using the autospin feature.
Cirqu Du Soleil Kooza’s high paying symbols are four of the troup’s performers in full costume and makeup in front of a coloured background. The most valuable of them being the red, devilish character, followed by the silver creature on a purple background, the lady-jester in orange, and the old-timey clown in blue.
The Wild symbol is simply the word “Wild” in a magenta box with gold trim. As is standard, the Wild can replace any of the low-paying or high-paying symbols, though not any of the bonus symbols. What’s a little unique here is that the Wild symbol is actually a high-paying symbol itself with its own value, and is the most valuable symbol in the game.
There are two other symbols in the game, each with their own distinct function. The Box symbol and the Bonus symbol. 3 or more of either symbol activates one of the game’s bonus features, but more on this below.
Here is where this game starts to get really interesting. Cirque Du Soleil Kooza is an online slot with tons of different bonus features, some more interesting than others. From cash bonuses to free spins to jackpots, Cirque Du Soleil Kooza really does have it all when it comes to bonus features. These features also, in our experience, activate often enough that you’re pretty much guaranteed to stay engaged and plugged-in to Cirque Du Soleil Kooza for hours.
There are two symbols that activate these features: the Box symbol and the Bonus symbol. For either of them to activate, at least three need to show up on the reels.
The Bonus Box takes our pick for our least favourite of all the bonus features, as we found that other bonus features yielded far bigger wins. This bonus feature has you pick between three boxes on the screen. Each box either contains a cash prize or, very rarely, a bonus symbol that activates the bonus wheel.
The cash prizes are always appreciated, though in our experience, they’re much lower amounts than you can win in any of the other bonus features. These are typically between 4 and 12 times your stake. The Bonus Wheel excited us a lot more than the Bonus Box did.
This is what happens when the Bonus symbol appears on reels 2, 3, and 4. Players are presented with a horizontal reel with a few different options on it, like the Wheel of Death, Trickster Free Games, and Jackpot Wheel, as well as cash bonuses.
The cash bonuses here are quite a bit larger than the ones found in the bonus box. We’ve had prizes of up to 40x our original stake come out of the Bonus Wheel
You may have noticed from our first screenshot that there are 4 jackpots listed above the reels. If you land on the Jackpot Wheel, you’re taken to yet another horizontal reel, where you’ll spin to see which of the four jackpots you’ll win. The Tres Magnifique jackpot is, obviously, the rarest win, with the Colossal jackpot not being far behind it. The Mini is technically the most common of the four, as the smallest, but we actually won the Grand jackpot (i.e. the second smallest) more often than we won the mini during our testing.
This is the most random of Cirque Du Soleil Kooza’s bonus features, and we loved it. You’re rewarded with double your initial stake as a cash bonus, plus ten free spins. Throughout your 10 free spins, the titular Trickster, Kooza, can appear at any point and upgrade the symbols on the reels by transforming them into either a Wild or one of the four high-paying character symbols.
We experienced the Trickster Free Games bonus feature a number of times during our testing and, in the majority of cases, ended the round with a decent amount of bonus cash thanks to Kooza’s transformations.
The Wheel of Death was definitely our favourite of all the game’s bonus features. This starts with a spinning wheel and a double-sided pointer. One side will land on the amount of free spins you’ll receive, which can be anywhere between 3 and 12, and a multiplier of either 2x, 3x, or 4x.
To make this feature even better, you can get even more free spins when 2 or more “More Free Games” symbols appear on the reels. Most times we saw the Wheel of Death in action, we ended up retriggering the feature and ending up with a tidy amount of free spins. All those spins plus that multiplier go a long way in helping the bonus cash pile up, and this is where we consistently saw our biggest and best wins.
Cirque Du Soleil Kooza is certainly a slot that surprised us. We never expected a slot based off an acrobatics show to draw us in the way that it did, and we’re likely to continue playing this game even though our Cirque Du Soleil Kooza slot review is over.
The many, varied bonus features combined with the wonderfully balanced variance make each spin feel significant, and we could watch these reels spin for hours.