Review: Days of the Tsar

In keeping with its historically-minded theme, Days of the Tsar is quite like the Russian art of the Romanov Dynasty: Majestic, large enough for a Texan on steroids, populated with the lovely and elegant, and ... unfortunately marked with long, looooooooooong breaks in the action.
Microgaming’s new 5-reel 25-payline Days of the Tsar shows so much energy and promise at first with Faberge egg SCATTERs, churchscapes, the imperial double-headed eagle, and great riffs of stereophonic sound, dude. Plus, the big big payout on this big game is 10,000 coins.
All you have to do is get three SCATTERs, eh? Easier said than done it would seem except LCD spent a Siberian winter waiting for the damn things, which appear to be rarer than, well, than actual Faberge eggs. When you actually do get the three ornate ova to manifest, the free spins come followed by the Dostoyevskian “Russian Roulette.”
It’s actually just a variation on the card-flip game, where guessing the suit is worth quadruple or nothing. A vicious little contest, indeed, and one made inordinately tempting by the rarity of the offer. Whilst playing Days of the Tsar, LCD discovered how Russian roulette came to be the big country’s informal national pastime: those long stretches of nothingness. Existential angst shouldn’t be included in a video slot. LCD rating: 6/10.
Days of the Tsar is available for play at Microgaming online casinos including Piggs Peak and Wild Jack, tovarisch.