3 Dancing Monkeys

There’s a huge market across Asia for Oriental-themed slots, and they’re proving equally popular in the western world too. That’s partly down to the many symbols representing wealth and good fortune, which resonate with slot fans hoping to win cash prizes! Not everyone’s going to walk away a winner though, so it takes more than a big prize pot to make an online slot game worth playing.

Design

Pragmatic Play has been in the business of creating online slot games for long enough to know what players want. Great design is where it all starts, and although 3 Dancing Monkeys relies on fairly low-key graphics, they’re wonderfully bright and shiny. The three monkeys of the game’s title sit in front of colourful piles of gemstones, and it all seems pretty inviting.  

It’s a little disappointing that the design team have set the reels against a static background of clouds that look more like balloons. It looks as though they crammed in a sky from a totally different game, but it’s not something we felt we needed to get too hung up about, as it’s the reels we’re all interested in!

Gameplay

Match up symbols on adjacent reels starting from the left to win cash prizes based on your stake. A wild symbol is on hand to help plug any gaps and generate some additional wins. 

Every coloured gemstone that spins up onto the reels is collected by one of the monkeys waiting for the moment to activate their unique bonus modifiers and increase your winning opportunities with a handful of free spins.

When a bonus is activated, the relevant monkey leaps up and down and proceeds to dance its way through 5 free spins. More than one bonus round can activate at a time with each awarding 5 free spins and applying its modifier until no more free spins remain.

• Red gemstone: 2 extra rows are added to each reel, creating a 5x5 grid

• Blue gemstone: wilds come with multipliers worth 2x, 3x or 5x

• Green gemstone: extra wilds are added to the three central reels

Win potential

At least five-of-a-kind Aces are needed before you start winning back the cost of the spin and even the top-paying red lanterns only return around 7x your stake for landing one on each reel. Multiple wins are needed to make any kind of progress here. 

The mystery symbols add an extra frisson of excitement during the bonus rounds awarding additional free spins or a cash payouts worth between 30x and 5,000x your payline bet.

You can’t buy the bonus round in the UK, but some jurisdictions allow this feature, which costs 100x the bet. This guarantees two free spin modifiers will activate on the following spin awarding 10 free spins with the potential for more. 

It doesn’t follow that any wins will return the purchase price, so it’s by no means a quick way of guaranteeing a profit!

Our Verdict

It won’t be to everyone’s taste, but 3 Dancing Monkeys is a fun way to while away some time with a couple of decent features that add some extra interest. The top payout of 12,077x will certainly draw in a few players, although whether anyone will stay for the long term is debatable.

This game certainly isn’t going to compete with other Pragmatic Play favourites, such as the Big Bass Bonanza series or The Dog House. On the other hand, not every new game is destined to set the online slots world alight, and 3 Dancing Monkeys does represent a chance of some solid cash returns.