Royal Reels casino review

Royal Reels has a rather lacklustre selection of bonuses and promotions. The welcome bonus for new players is solid, but really it’s nothing special. However, there is a no-deposit bonus for players to claim and try out the casino. 

The welcome bonus only offers a match up to NZ$500. As such, I much prefer the more lucrative offer from JackpotCity, which gives up to NZ$1,600. Yes, this latter is spread over four deposits, but it’s still a better deal. 

I will give Royal Reel kudos though for keeping the wagering requirements low. These are just 30x, which is on par, or lower, than most other casinos including Stake, which sits at 40x. This doesn’t make the overall offer better. 

It’s also a disappointment to see that there are no free spins on offer. There is nothing extra with the welcome bonus, and only a cashback is awarded to regular players. Maybe in future they will add some spins. 

Finally, there is a VIP program, but it is not clearly advertised. It required some sleuthing to find that it’s an automatic one. The more players bet, the better the rewards are as they move up through the levels. 

Right, so there is some good news here in that there are many games to choose from. Over 6,000 in fact, which is a solid start for a casino. 

In fact, this is a larger game library than Guts, which only has 2,000 or so games. However, this is where the good comparisons end. There are no jackpots to find at all. 

And, the live casino is very small. With 32 games, it’s a far cry from Playzilla’s 350 live dealer games. Surprisingly, the collection at Royal Reels comes from Evolution and Pragmatic Live, so they are good games. 

However, the game collection is poorly laid out with minimal game filters. It was hard to find any games. And initially, I thought there were no video poker games either. 

It was hard to find a good pokie without using the provider filter or knowing what game to search for specifically. So more filters are a must for this site to be usable. 

Payments and transactions are how players can actually begin playing, so it’s important to have this information readily available. You would think so at least, but I could find almost nothing on Royal Reels. 

After a bit of a search, some of the FAQs revealed the answers. Crypto and credit/debit cards with no more detail than that was all I could find. A far cry from Neon Vegas and its available selection of eWallets. 

There was also limited information when it came to the actual transactions possible. In fact, all I could find was a minimum deposit of NZ$30, which is higher than Royal Panda’s NZ$10. 
Nowhere else could I find any additional information. And, the live chat wasn’t helpful as it refused to load so I couldn’t even get a query in.

It does concern me that the only two payment methods are the ones that can lead to problem gambling. And all this on an unverified licenced casino. 

I can’t hold back here. One of my strictest requirements is that a casino has a licence. When I can’t find one, then this raises huge red flags for me. 

Players need to feel safe when they play, and I could find neither hide nor hair of a licence here. When other sites like BetVictor have multiple licences (UKGC, Ontario, Ireland and Gibraltar), it puts Royal Reels to shame. 

Okay, so there are SSL encryption protocols in place. But these become essentially meaningless when the rest of the site is so negligent in terms of security and safety. 

Royal Reels does at least claim to offer the full complement of responsible gambling tools, which does make it one up on Casino Days. I am inclined not to believe this though. 

As with other casinos, Royal Reels requires players to get in touch to set up any limits or exclusions. And given how poor the live chat support is, this may take some time.

How to even begin this section? On top of everything else, this was literally the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was finding the lack of any information a pain, so I attempted to use the live chat. 

Sadly, although it is sticky, and readily spotable, it doesn’t appear to work. I spent ages waiting for it to load and just had to watch a spinning circle while nothing happened. 

Suffice it to say, I really miss Excitewin’s super speedy and helpful support, even with that casino’s slight accessibility issues. Anything is better than Royal Reels support at this point. 

There are other options such as email, which is the option the casino pushes for most. I did attempt to find answers myself though, using the FAQ. Disappointment again. It doesn’t come close to the comprehensive nature of Empire.io’s help. 

On top of that, all the footer information pops up in tiny boxes, not separate pages. The text is tiny, which requires squinting and it is spectacularly unhelpful and vague for everything. 

This site technically looks ok, but once I started to actually use it and navigate about, then the issues started to surface with increasing frequency, which is not ideal. 

Clutching at straws here, the only thing that’s good about this casino layout is that it’s a dark theme. And I much prefer it over the bright white offered by CasinoVibes. 

The site as a whole though, has a dated feel and loads slowly. With over 9 seconds in load time, this is far from acceptable. Just look at casinos like 22Bet with a 0.4 second load time. 

The issue was particularly bad when I tried to load all the pokies. Each time I clicked on ‘more games’ the process took forever. And then trying to open a game … forget it. 

I would also like to see more filters in place as there was only a provider filter offered. It made it very hard to find any good games, especially with there being an overload of pokies.