Ishtar Power Zones

Ishtar Power Zones Review

With the Ishtar: Power Zones slot, the game expands its growing portfolio of online slot machines. Based on an ancient Mesopotamian goddess of sexual love, war, and justice, the game revolves around the flashy Power Zones mechanic, which debuted less than a year ago and has already captured players' hearts all around the globe.

Ishtar: Power Zones - Slot Outlook

Set in somewhere in Mesopotamia, the Ishtar: Power Reels slot plays out on a massive 6x5 grid, producing 15,625 ways to play on each spin. For those who are unaware, Mesopotamia was a region in the Near East between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, where the earliest human civilization on Earth was born - Sumer. People believed in many deities back in the time, and Ishtar was one of the most worshiped Sumerian gods and had a sanctuary built in her honor. Apparently, you can see it to the left of the reels, while the right side of the screen showcases a typical mountainous landscape of the Near East.

The math model in Ishtar: Power Reels is similar to the one found in another slot, and the biggest difference is RTP, which has been lowered significantly to 95.62%. Meanwhile, the high volatility, as well as the 10,000x max win capability, remained untouched. The stakes here, in turn, range from $0.2 to $250 per spin.

The paytable in the Ishtar: Power Zones slot consists of 11 regular symbols, and Ishtar herself is a top star here. She is followed by winged horses, jewels, bracelets, and emeralds, while the lower symbols are made up of A-9 royals. Achieving a win requires landing at least 3 instances of the same symbol adjacently starting from the leftmost reel, and 6-of-a-kind premium symbol wins pay from 0.35x to 1x the stake. It could seem a tad little, though, as far as wins are scored across 15,625 paylines, you can get paid pretty well. There's also a Wild symbol included that helps you form winning combos, yet it can only appear via the features, explained below.

Ishtar: Power Zones - Bonus Features

As we proceed to the extras, we see that Ishtar: Power Zones offers quite a different gameplay than other games powered by the Power Zones engine. Oddly enough, the developers omitted the bonus game, and the slot relies heavily on the 3 random modifiers that can pop up on any base game spin.

Anyway, the Power Zones mechanic is central to the gameplay, and most wins come via transforming symbols. Any symbol except Wild can land with a blue flame effect attached to it, and whenever those land anywhere on the reels, a Power Zone appears on that spot. Power Zones are locked to the reels until used, and these can link together vertically and horizontally to create bigger zones.

If a charged symbol lands on a position marked as the Power Zone, it transforms all other symbols in the area into the same instances. Then, triggered Power Zones will be removed from the reels.

The 3 random modifiers are called Flames of Ishtar, and depending on the color of flame, you can get the following features:

• Random Wilds - when the screen gets blue, a random number of Wild symbols will be added to the reels.
• Goddess Mode - when the screen gets green, you'll receive a random number of paid Respins with a 2x Multiplier, which applies to all wins featuring Power Zones. Each symbol transformation adds +1 to the Multiplier value, and the feature always ends with a Fire Spin.
• Fire Spin - when the screen gets red, all symbols in Power Zones transform into the same randomly chosen symbol. If the Fire Spin plays after the Goddess Mode, the accumulated Multiplier will be applied to the win.

Ishtar: Power Zones - Slot Verdict

Players love when slot developers come up with new ideas, and so does the studio, which doesn't just recycle its trademarked Power Zones mechanic, but tweaks it in different ways to offer a different kind of experience. The Power Zones suite of games already counts only 4 titles, but you cannot say those play out pretty much the same despite having a common core mechanic, and that's highly appreciated.