Puppy Love

If there was ever a slot aimed specifically for the lovers of small, cute dogs, this would be it. Puppy Love was released by Betsoft in 2013 and shows off a wide variety of pups to cycle through, as well as the various things that are important to them, such as their houses, collars, and food bowls, hiding special features while dazzling you with a 5-reel 20-payline game and the wide eyes of poor little dogs just waiting for adoption. You wouldn’t say no to that face, would you?

The graphics are acceptable, but it might be playing up the Puppy Love a bit too much for our tastes. While we understand they’re meant to look cutesy and huggable, they all feel like they’ve been drawn the same way, despite different looks – a slightly tilted head, eyes and ears drooping down, it almost makes you want to run off and adopt a real pup instead of playing the slot.
Meanwhile, if you plan to play this for more than a couple of spins, you should know it is a low volatility game. It has a good RTP, but a lot of the scores you will be getting will barely push you over back to the balance you started with. It alternates between streaks of wins and losses, and while it can be quite fun, especially when the bonuses come into play, you won’t have lost too much money by the end of it, nor will you have won much either.

Puppy Love doesn’t boast a progressive jackpot, which might have spruced things up a bit. We can’t fault the slot too much – in the first ten to fifteen spins, you probably know what you’re into. It won’t give you any massive wins – the largest you could score is a $50,000 on the maximum bet, which ends up being around 500x increase to your wager. And that money can very quickly evaporate before you know it.

While you can technically play on the lowest bet level of $0.02, you won’t have much fun as you will have almost all the paylines disabled. With all twenty of them active, your minimum goes up to $0.40, which isn’t particularly cheap, but finding a middle-ground between the two can be a good idea for casual players.

There are six small dogs, but they could have cut them down to three, as each dog has a pair that has the same value assigned to it – with just a different type of dog sitting on the playing field. Alongside this, you have a small doghouse which is the largest single jackpot in the game. Beyond that are the special features that this Betsoft release puts on offer.

The first is its Wilds. Coming in the shape of a collar, it can replace everything except the Scatter and Bonus Round symbols. When three Wilds appear stacked on a single reel, that reel locks itself in place, as the player is awarded between two to four re-spins. You can retrigger this up to five times, at which point you will probably run out of reels to have your re-spins on!

Scatters award 10 free spins for scoring three of them in the second, third and fourth reel. This never feels nice, as it ruins the idea of a Scatter – triggered from anywhere, with just the right amount of people. The nice part about the special feature, while it is rare, is that Wild re-spins can still happen while it is active.
Finally, we have the Bonus Game, which ends up being a puppy collector. You make two signs that say ‘Puppy for sale’ appear, and take your pick not out of the puppies themselves, but a list of names of those puppies, which feels like a missed opportunity. At the end, you see your score go up, and it wraps up.