Apocalypse Cow

Everyone's familiar with Apocalypse Now. It's many people's favourite war film, it introduced Harrison Ford to US audiences (yes, he's in it right at the beginning and the film was made slightly before American Graffiti). The film stars a slightly disturbed Martin Sheen dragging himself around the sweaty Vietnam jungle looking for an insane Marlon Brando, who allegedly puts in one of the best performances of his life. It's no surprise then that those cheeky chaps down at the Microgaming stable have decided to parody the moody film in their inventive and hilarious fruit machine, Apocalypse Cow.

The game is everything you'd expect from a Microgaming masterpiece and features the smooth graphical interface together with the rich coloured graphics and lush audio that characterise so many of this excellent gaming company's fruit machines. The symbols on the reels include such things as cherries, melons, ammo stacks and helicopters, with the maximum win of 500 coins available on the machine paid out to those players lucky enough to stop three cow symbols on that paper thin pay line.

Holds, nudges and shiftas are available on the machine although as with many UK fruit machines right now there are no wilds, stoppas or multipliers. The game is played across the standard 3 reel format and the brightly coloured fruity features a single pay line making this one of the easiest gambling games on the market for new players to understand.

Score three t-bone symbols (the cow has obviously met its bovine apocalypse at this stage) and you'll find yourself enlisted into the bonus game and you're dragged off into a bonus game just like all those young marines were dragged off into Nam. Many of the young marines coped in this 1960's war by taking crazy substances such as LSD, so it was probably a no brainer for the developers when they themed the bonus game around the Vietnam 'psychedelic experience' in relation to this practice. The bonus game is a board based affair with a circular pathway which the player traverses based on reel spins which give the player the number of moves they make on that go. As fruit machine experts will already guess some of the squares are good and represent feature or cash add-ons and some are not so good and give players booby prizes where you lose everything you've made in the bonus so far and it's game over time. When players land on a winning square however they face the classic fruity conundrum of whether to stick with the win offered or to play on hoping for more, but with the chance you could lose everything. As you can see this bonus game is of the type that fruit machine aficionados will live, eat and sleep so the game has enough depth to appeal to the serious punter.

We challenge anyone with a sense of humour not to enjoy this non-too-serious fruit machine. It's simple enough for anyone to play with enough bite in the bonus to satisfy the serious players searching for some fruity fun.