The Magic Shoppe

Enter a world of intrigue and mystery in a dark alley behind forgotten buildings and thick cobwebs. There lies the The Magic Shoppe and all the many great and terrible things that lurk within. This 5-reel, 25-payline slot is a Betsoft’s release and offers interesting whispers of wealth and fortune to those who are willing to take a trip down the darker side of life. Take a careful look while selecting what you’ll buy. Red and blue lockboxes can award you lucrative free spins, careful handling of magic wands can spread Wilds all over, and if you’re feeling exceptionally lucky, try a coin toss to potentially double all your winnings.

The game shows off the appeal of good graphics blended with fantastic art style. The whole experience feels claustrophobic at first, as the backdrop seems all around you, and it even feels like the reels have been squeezed in barely. This plays in nicely among seemingly mundane items such as silver coins and top hats for high value icons, while standard icons seem to be a deck full of haunted poker cards. Far less exciting, but at least it fits a lot more than it usually does!

Between the good RTP and the frequent appearance of special features to lay down decent wins, The Magic Shoppe has great potential within it. It is medium variance, with low individual symbol payout that’s made up by frequent free spins and appearing Wilds, but while these are exciting, wins outside of them are scarce and fail to live up to expectations. While you can play this slot for lower amounts of money, in our experience, this is the sort of game where you can get back as much as you put in.

While magic may be all around us, it certainly isn’t keeping track of any secret progressive jackpots that you might win for yourself. In fact, jackpots in general aren’t that amazing in this slot. The largest fixed jackpot you can win isn’t amazing, but unlike other games we recently criticised for having awful paytables, it works here due to the heavy presence of extra turns and Wilds that pop up all over the place. They tend to dry up as time passes, so once you get solidly ahead in winnings, you may want to take a break and cash in on what you pocketed so far.

And as we already mentioned, The Magic Shoppe isn’t afraid of letting you spin for a little. Namely, you can play it for $0.50 up to $125, but with such low payouts in general, any bigger money wins will more or less require more of an investment. As such, low rollers may find other slots more suited for them.

We quite like the symbol choices for the game, specifically because they are so mundane. A haunted pack of cards form the regular standard symbols of 10, J, Q, K and A. Higher value icons consist of a top hat, a silver coin, a pair of daggers, handcuffs, and a skull. Save for the last two, all of these things you could find in a regular home and it just fills the mind with dread what sort of power lies within them that they’re found in such an oppressive place of dark magic?

There are two different Scatters which feel split for no particular reason. You unlock sun or moon boxes and you can get between 3 and 12 free spins depending on how many boxes were unlocked. There is no actual gameplay difference between them that we could notice, leaving them split for no particular reason beyond lowering the odds of them appearing. However, considering there are still plenty of bonus turns popping up, and that you can retrigger them, we won’t complain too hard about it.

If you come across the Magic Wand, more specifically, three of them – they will transform into Wilds, increasing your odds of winning. A nice thing about them is that if you have any loose lockboxes lying around that aren’t part of a free spin trigger, they transform into Wilds too.