The Emirate II Slot Review

Dubai after dark, rendered in gold: superyachts, penthouse skylines and a sheikh who looks like he owns the block. What defines The Emirate II is what it skips. No free spins, no bonus round, nothing to unlock at all. Twenty fixed lines and stacked wilds, and that is the whole machine.

Endorphina built the sequel on the same 5x3 frame as the original and put the budget into art rather than mechanics. The gold Scatter disc pays from any position and stacks on top of line wins, though it opens nothing. Three network progressives (Grand, Major and Minor) sit above the game, drawn at random when a casino has them enabled.

96% RTP, high volatility, and everything riding on the base game.

The reels sit inside a carved gold portico, pillars and all, floating over a Dubai waterfront at night. Behind it the skyline burns pink and green into flat black water, and those reflections do more visual work than most of what lands on the reels. Every symbol gets its own colour panel: the sheikh in a white ghutra and gold-trimmed robe against warm amber, a woman in a black hijab and gold browband set against violet towers, a white superyacht cutting teal water, a gold dallah coffee pot lit green from below, the Burj Khalifa spiking through neon blue and magenta.

The Wild is a blue and gold jewelled medallion, easily the prettiest thing in the set, and the curved khanjar dagger with its tasselled cord is a nicer piece of drawing than this game strictly needed. The portraits are handsome and stiff, though. They look painted rather than animated, nothing in the background moves, and the luxury pitch ends up reading as a still life instead of a place. Well made, just inert.

Everything resolves on the spin itself. Nothing builds, nothing counts up, the game never changes gear, so a session runs at one flat tempo and turbo just makes that tempo quicker. Twenty lines at high volatility means the dry stretches have nothing to interrupt them either. A wild stack dropping in the right column is the only spike on offer, and you either catch one or you sit through another fifty spins of daggers and necklaces.

What that produces is a fast, low-friction grinder that reads clearly and asks nothing of you. Some players want exactly that. The risk is the gamble becoming the de facto feature, since it is the only button that does anything interesting, and it happens to be the worst-value action in the game.

A good looking slot with a 2010 engine under it, and how much that grates depends on whether a game has to entertain you between wins or only pay you. The symbol set is drawn with more care than the math got. Stacked wilds plus a scatter that pays from anywhere does keep the reels legible in a way that feature-stacked modern slots are not, and there is something to be said for a machine that never makes you wait for a bonus you were not going to hit anyway.

The jackpot draw is the one thing that could turn a session, and it is also the one thing the player has no influence over and might not even have access to. For my money the first Emirate did the same job, so the artwork is really the only argument for switching. Pretty, and thin.