How to Choose the Best Slot for You
Slots Play Casinos strives every day to be your go-to source for information on slots. It's not enough for us to say that we write and publish excellent game reviews. There are thousands of slots out there from a large and growing number of game providers. The task of trying out every slot is quite a challenging one which we accept happily. After all, we like playing slots as much as the most devoted gamers!
We sample the wiles of the best and most recent slots - adding new slot reviews every month - and we report the results to you, our loyal readers. So let's get at it:
How Do We Review a Slot?
We examine the slot from a number of points of view:
Graphics, Animation, and Sound
We certainly have come a long way baby in terms of these three super important parameters for modern slots. As the technology continues to improve, we tell you how the new and improved technology is translated into slots playing fun.
The Characters
Even in a slot with twelve characters, the game developer might have to choose from hundreds of possible characters. Every good game developer has large teams that work on every new slot in progress. These teams brainstorm which characters to develop for the slot.
This is a greater challenge to the game providers than you might think. For example, ancient civilizations and societies are a favorite genre of slots for gamers and developers alike. But how often can a slot feature a centurion? How often can Cleopatra be a figure in a slot?
The range of slot genres is vast. The creative teams at the developers have to come up with new ways to express gamers' feelings about Christmas, Halloween, the long, hot summer, and many other genres. Why aren't there any slots with an Easter theme? That's because Easter, unlike Christmas, doesn't lend itself to the entertainment values of a slots game.
Easter is a solemn holiday while Christmas, with themes of Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus, the elves, the reindeer, the North Pole, gifts, Christmas trees, snow and ice, the colors of Christmas, stockings hanging by a lit fireplace, and on and on is much more the fun family oriented day.
Halloween is scary and scary is a very prominent theme in slots!
The Action of the Wild Symbol
In the old days, which weren't so long ago, but which seems to be long ago given the awesome technological advances of the last 50 or so years, there were wild "symbols" in some poker variations. Slots had three reels and one payline.
Then a lot of good things broke loose! Wild symbols inhabit every interesting slot these days. At first, it was enough for the wild symbol to be modestly wild and to substitute for all the other symbols except the scatter symbol which is a story in and of itself!
But now we all want the wild symbols to do a lot more than just play the role of the slot machine equivalent of the substitute teacher. We want the wild symbols to stick to the reels, to expand, to be stacked, and to have multipliers that can increase. In other words, we want to wild symbols to be like the Wild West, really, truly wild!
The Scatter Symbol
This is the symbol that wins in all positions and, in most slots, gets you to the free spins bonus rounds. These bonus rounds are where the really big wins are just waiting patiently to happen! It's as if they are sitting around reading that long novella until you, the happy gamer, gets three, four, or five scatter symbols and off you go to the bonus round.
Now the big wins have to come out of the shadows and take up a prominent role! Well, in the slots we review, among the thousands that we try out, the scatters take gamers to very exciting bonus rounds indeed!
Variance
Some slots have very big jackpots and some have relatively small jackpots. Slots may all have a return to player rate of about 97% but the slots with the very big jackpots will have high variance. This means that there are relatively fewer winning spins but the winning spins are more lucrative than in the low variance slots.
Low variance slots give gamers a lot of small wins so they can maintain their bankroll and have a great time playing the slots! Of course, as in so many other areas, some slots have moderate variance. These may be called the Goldilocks of slots: not too big, not too small, Just Right!