Area 777 is a slot machine 'rpg' where you fight aliens by spinning reels to match symbols and attack them. You're also trying to get more cash to continue playing and to get experience to level up and unlock new type of reels, new machines and new power-ups. I didn't have a terrible time with the game but the huge full-screen ads that popped out all the time, combined with unrefined RPG mechanics and the unpredictability of chance games made me uninstall it after I had seen one too many advertisement for some product I didn't care at all about.
The game starts with only three reels and a few symbols that you match to make some coinage and gain experience each time you spin the reels or kill enemies. The different alien types come from the right of the screen and move towards your character to steal your coins. Landing a winning combo under an alien damages it and other symbols - like the cards - attack enemies when matched. That being said, the game gives you almost no information about the various enemies. How many hits can they take? Do certain symbols deal more damage? How many coins are they going to steal from you if they manage to hit you? How many spaces do they move? It's a poorly thought RPG, I think it would've been better to remove that component, or to change it a bit so you're on one side of the screen, enemies stay on the other, matches deal damage to them and they attack you by sending stuff your way, something like that.
Leveling-up is actually pretty fun - even if it ALWAYS includes a stupid ad - because you unlock new gameplay mechanics most of the time. There are plenty of symbols to unlock for your slot machine - cherries that act as a shield, premium currency-giving symbols, birds that attack enemies, etc. - and you have to unlock the ability to be more and more coins - in order to win more and more of them - in various patterns. You also get special chips that can be quite useful, like freezing reels or wildcards. After a while you might be tempted to play at the highest paying machine you can, but the cost gets quite prohibitive.
Premium currency can be bought and used to replenish your chips or to trigger 'special events' faster. These events occur after a certain number of minutes and are usually a good way to make money and experience. One of them, however, embodies my whole issues with chance-based free to play games, how random is it really? There's a minigame where you have to select tiles until you get 3 bad ones. Are they really random? How could you know? It's a free-to-play game with making money out of you in mind, it's probably designed to give you a specific result! The same questions go with the spinning reels, how random are they? The house always wins, right?
It's a bit of a shame the ads aren't removed if you buy some currency - or that it's not explained - because I would have maybe did so. There aren't many slot machine games that aren't purely about slots and Area 777 is one of them, and it's not terrible. As I often say in these reviews, I kinda wish that this game would've been on a proper platform without any of the microtransactions baked in the whole thing.
