Take The Shot

Step out to the basketball court and take your shot at greatness in Betsoft’s aptly named Take the Shot slot game. Set on a mid-sized 5×4 game grid, this fun game is filled to the brim with references and themes that every real basketball fan will be thrilled to see. While it’s not actually associated with any basketball leagues or brands, it still manages to capture the excitement and challenge that makes this sport so attractive.

On the gameplay side of things, Take the Shot introduces a sort of progressive feature that adds a whole new level of strategy. To be clear, there is no progressive jackpot in Take the Shot slots. However, certain features allow certain spins to influence future rounds. That’s not a common sight in the world of online slots, though Betsoft has experimented with the idea in the past.

Take the Shot from Betsoft mostly plays like a standard online slot machine. Most experienced casino-goers will immediately know what to do.

It’s played on a 5×4 grid with 75 ways to win. All you have to do is hit matching symbols along one or more of these 75 paylines. Winning lines can only be made from left to right, starting with the leftmost reel. You generally need at least 3 matching symbols to win a payout, with increasing rewards for additional matched icons. However, the Ring symbol, which is the highest-paying regular symbol in the game, can also win a small prize with 2 in a line.

Although there are 75 different ways to win, the Take the Shot casino game offers a relatively low hit rate with just over 20%. Generally speaking, having three matching symbols anywhere on the first three reels will result in a win. There are exceptions, though, such as when the matching symbols appear on completely opposite ends of the reels.

Take the Shot boasts average volatility and fairly low RTP at 95.14%.

All you need to do before playing is use the buttons at the bottom to decide the size of your stake. Then just hit ‘Spin’, sit back, and hope for the best.

The only additional option is buying the free spins feature, which you can do by clicking on the shopping cart icon in the bottom left. This costs 27x the stake for the basic version, or 50x for the upgraded version with more Wilds. You can find more information about the game’s bonus round in the next section of this review.

The game features 12 regular symbols of different values. Playing card ranks ranging from 9 to Ace act as low-paying symbols, while the various basketball-themed symbols offer medium and high pays. Frankly, though, there are no real high-paying symbols in this game. Even the most valuable symbols offer relatively tiny payouts.

To illustrate, there are only two ways to cover the cost of your stake without any special features – by hitting 5 ring or trophy symbols on a winning line. That’s right: a four-symbol combination of the game’s most valuable symbol won’t even break even.

The RTP of Take the Shot slots is 95.14%, which is almost 1% below what we can call average.

The game’s distinguishing features are the progressive Stopwatch and the Wilds. The two features are intertwined in many ways, so we’ll cover them together.

Stopwatch & Wilds

The Player icons are special symbols that don’t do anything when they initially appear on the grid. Instead, they turn into stopwatches and stick to the grid, remaining in place during subsequent spins.

You can see a stopwatch at the bottom right corner of the game. It counts down from 10 every time you spin, eventually reaching zero. Once this happens, all Player/Stopwatch symbols on the grid are converted into Wilds. Wilds can substitute any other regular symbol in the game, so this generally results in multiple big wins. The Wilds are then cleared and the stopwatch resets back to 0.

Hitting 5 Wilds on a payline counts as hitting 5 instances of the highest-paying symbol in the game.

Free Spins

The Scatter symbol is used to trigger Free Spins. It can only appear on reels 3, 4, and 5. Hitting 3 of them anywhere on the board awards the player 15 Free Spins.

Take the Shot free spins do not advance the Stopwatch. However, every spin is guaranteed to have 5, 7, or 10 Wilds. This substantially increases your chances of hitting winning lines during the bonus round.