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Renowned for taking gambles, whether it’s challenging the dominance of major label record companies and flag carrying airlines or aiming for world records in balloons, planes and speedboats, it’s little surprise that Richard Branson has expanded his Virgin empire into online gaming. Virgin established its reputation as a great British brand back in the 1970s by doing things differently and delivering great entertainment, so has it been able to bless its 21st Century online casino with these enviable attributes? Is it a sold gold hit or a lead balloon?
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| First impressions of the Virgin Casino website are very good, with a bright, clear layout greeting you on its Welcome Page. There’s quite a lot of information displayed, but it doesn’t overwhelm the first-time visitor and wefound it easy to assimilate what Virgin could offer and where to click on its navigation to find out more. |
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For returning customers to this online casino, login and game selection is also nicely implemented here. We also found it helpful to have the casino games navigation broken down into subgenres – Tables & Poker, Roulette, Blackjack, Sots, Instant Win & Keno, and MegaJackpots (i.e. progressives) – to aid speedy selection of our favourites. The look and feel of the Virgin site is geared towards ‘fun’ and inclusive, mass appeal, rather than exclusivity and hushed high-rolling; it also feels distinctly less ‘gentleman’s club’ than some rival online casinos, so we can imagine Virgin having appeal for players whose heads aren’t turned by the glamourpuss virtual croupiers and casino managers other operators sometimes deploy.
Click here to play at Virgin Casino
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| Virgin has worked hard to make its website a welcoming experience, fixing many flaws that we found frustrating when we first reviewed it on its launch back in 2005, and we must praise it for continuing to develop its casino site to make it more ergonomic and friendly for novices to online gaming.The Virgin Casino games are all sourced from the well-respected WagerWorks stable, |
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and are ‘Instant Play’ requiring users to have no more than the ubiquitous Macromedia Flash software installed on their computer. This approach also means Virgin has greater support for different computer platforms as Flash is available for far more flavours of operating systems than just Windows. Curiously we did find that using our test Mac’s default Safari browser threw up a problem which stopped us logging in to play (the space to fill in out email was missing!) but switching to using Firefox got us round this and everything worked like a charm. We have little doubt this minor quirk will be fixed since, if it is not an issue with the browser itself (i.e. Apple need to fix a bug in Safari) , our experience is that Virgin Casino was very responsive to previous Mac-related issues we experienced during an earlier review.
Click here to play at Virgin Casino
Virgin Casino’s use of exclusively non-download games means the widest spectrum of web users can easily enjoy the attractive selection of free and real money gaming it offers. What impresses us about its games is that, whilst the level of detail may not be quite as rich as at casinos that use download software to run their games, the gameplay here is not compromised at all and the audio and visual quality is truly excellent, giving users an engagingly authentic casino experience. The smoothness of the graphic animation is a real treat and there's a good balance struck between making the games look lush and realistic and keeping the loading times acceptable even on slow dial-up connections. If a 'quick' game is also a reason you're drawn to online casinos that use non-download products, then many of Virgin Casino’s games also come with a "turbo' feature to speed up play and let you squeeze more betting into a session. Virgin Casino isn’t the only instant play casino out there but we think its WagerWorks games really are some of the very best – seriously; go and have a free play of the Craps or Roulette games if you don’t believe us! They’re gorgeous.
Click here to play at Virgin Casino
Promotional incentives to sign-up and play at Virgin Casino (beyond the usual Welcome Bonus) are plentiful, making good use of the wider Virgin empire to source very worthwhile non-cash prizes. Furthermore, if international travel’s your bag, the V* Points you can earn by playing as a regular here can be converted to Virgin Atlantic Flying Club Miles which is a novel, and useful, option. One area that used to be weak with Virgin Casino was its provision of decent progressive jackpots, but we are happy to report that this company has again shown commendable attention to improving its service, and now offers some rather tempting MegaJackpot games. How tempting? Well. This casino’s multi-line, multi-coin, multi-currency beasts should satisfy big bounty slot jockeys with their start and reset Jackpot values weighing in at a cool £1.5 million!
All in all, Virgin's online casino just keeps getting better and better. It delivers in spades on its promise of being great fun and, backed by such a reputable brand, comes with a reassuring pedigree that means secure money transactions and fair play are a given. Customer service is also a strong aspect of Virgin’s brand appeal and this is well handled at its casino too, with friendly and helpful staff manning the free e-mail and phone channels around the clock. Factoring in the low minimum bets and deposits you can make if you want to play for real money here, we think Virgin’s online casino deserves its continuing success and should be high on the list of any online casino virgin’s sites to try.
Click here to play at Virgin Casino |
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