Pollen Nation Slot
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Apart from being an amusing and hilarious pun, Pollen Nation is a playable little Slots title from Microgaming that celebrates everything bee. It’s also forward thinking – the push from environmentalists to get everyone thinking about our diminishing bee population and how we can save them has payed forward. It’s nice to see Microgaming doing their bit.
Gameplay
The gentle sound of nature accompanies us all the way through this game, although I was hoping for a buzzing hum when we spin our five reels. Instead, we are treated to birdsong in the meadows, or at least what we might imagine to be in the meadows. It might be birdsong in the beer garden for all we know, though those birds tend to have a shrill note to them. They, and we, will be glad to know that this is a coin based game, so the usual conversion of credits to coins occurs, with coin bets varying along with credits and pay-lines. Benefit? Allows us greater options in terms of strategy and game-play.
It is not only bees themselves that make up the symbols across our reels as we hunt down the game’s 25 pay-lines – a Nurse bee, Worker bee and Guard bee are on duty here. They are joined by some of the bee products that we love to celebrate. Honeycomb, Honey, Pollen Puffs breakfast cereal (artistic license required), Bees Wax and Royal Jelly. Before you go licking your lips, Royal Jelly is a secretion that worker bees feed to their larvae, but I’m sure it would go a treat with a glass of pinot. And no hive would be complete without the Queen – she is our Wild symbol and triples our win when two or more of her buzz up, and while landing five Queens may sound like a boisterous stag trip it is the bee of our dreams and offers a bonus up to 60,000 coins.
Bonuses
Along with our top paying Bee symbols, Microgaming treat us to two Scatters in Pollen Nation. The first, a Scatter Bee, multiplies our total bet staked for that win, multiplying by 5x for three Scatter Bees up to a whopping 80x if we land five of these sore-bottomed bees across the reels.
The second, sweeter bee is the Babee Scatter, which launches the Babee Bonus game when we land three or more of them across the five reels. We must fill up the Baby Bee’s (there’s only so much you can say Babee without going crazy) bottle with honeycomb until we find the “Stop” symbol, at which point our prize is calculated up to a potential tune of 32,250 coins.
Summary
Bees may be considered semi-social, but in this outing from Microgaming they are prolifically friendly. Although, I’m not sure I would mess with the guard. He doesn’t look very social at all. Fortunately, we are the ones to be playing this online slot and, as they say, the proof of the honey is in the eating. We’re licking our lips already.