Spadegaming

About the Company

Spadegaming is an online casino game developer with headquarters in Malta and the Philippines and offices in Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. The company was established in 2007 by Shen Seow in Malaysia and has developed over 120 games.

The developers focus their energies on Asian games for Asian players with all games exhibiting cultural themes. In addition to slots they also create table and arcade games, but slots take up most of their portfolio. They release a new batch of games every three months to keep the offering fresh and up to date.

Some of the online venues their games can be found at include GPK, Fun88, and Deluxe Gold casinos among many others which seem to be entirely focused on the Asian markets.

Games and Software

The slots we tested on their website were delivered over a web browser using javascript. As they are also an EveryMatrix partner, we might assume that the platform provider may execute JS to HTML5 conversion when the games are played at casinos operating with the EveryMatrix casino engine.

While some of the games are simple 3-reel affairs, many of their newer titles use more modern layouts and mechanics. The 1024 ways Golden Chicken is played on five reels with four visible positions each. The theme is an interesting hybrid of Aesop's Fables mixed with Asian cultural symbolism. Many of the characters used in the slots are rudimentary, doll-like figures with decent 3D rendering. Golden Chicken features free spins with multipliers up to 5x and a jackpot combination of up to 2,000x bet.

Some of the games are just "out there" by Western standards but may fit nicely into other cultures. First Love is a 5x3 video slot with 243 Ways to win. All that is needed to form a winning combination is to land matching symbols on adjacent reels from leftmost to right. Where the game truly stands out is in its theme. For better or much worse, we would never see a game like it developed by Microgaming, NetEnt, or even Betsoft.

First Love is set in a classroom with a student (wild) and teacher (scatter) as the main characters. The teacher is holding a book on sex education. Reel symbols include love letters, girly magazines, a cell phone, condoms, and a "marital aid" that resembles a rabbit along with J-A lower paying symbols. When a scatter lands the teachers gives a creepy smile. When a wild symbol is involved in a line win, the buxom teen bows. We will not describe what occurs during the Hentai Wild Feature but there are action and nudity involved with the 'stacked' wilds.

Some of the games seem to be produced to a higher standard than others but in most we tested, the splash screens depicted superior art compared to actual gameplay. The 50-line Ming Dynasty had decent animation, but the main mechanic was a little confusing. On the first spin all15 reel positions filled with the same icon, and then arrows hit each reel position and turned it into a non-winning spin. It seemed like an unneeded element of mystery as we find spinning the reels to reveal a result to be enough most of the time.

It may have been the java, or it may be intrinsic to all of their games, but the reels did not spin smoothly. They were a little jerky and hard to watch on a large display without getting a headache. We were unable to get the game to load in or convert to landscape wide angle view on a mobile device, but the jerky reels were still an issue even at that small size.

We found a few unique games such as Pocket Mon GO which changed which symbols were on display during free spins, but for the most part, there doesn't seem to be a lot of innovation going on in the creative department.

The Final Analysis

Being particularly drawn to Asian themed slots I was a little disappointed not to find exciting new mechanics and features from a company that focuses exclusively on the genre. That said, the games aren't 'bad' by any means, and some are quite good. The RNG is certified by iTech Labs. They seem to be diligently translating their content into 14 languages. We'll look for them on other platforms and follow industry news while the company continues to grow.

External Links

Official Facebook
Official Youtube
Official Weibo