Take The Bank Slot – Free Demo

Diamonds at the top, bombs on the reels

Creator Betsoft returns to the vault yet again for a robbery themed slot titled Take The Bank, and the title refers in part to the robbers making off with the paytable, in part to the way bombs cling to the reels and await their turn. The counter that decides when they go off runs in rounds of ten spins. When they detonate, players gain from wilds. These are distributed across the standard 75 fixed paylines. Betsoft has fiddled with this concept in several slots in the past, Fruitbat Crazy among them. They haven't quite set the genre alight. Will Take The Bank do any better?

Betsoft encircles the standard 5-reel, 4-row playing area with abundant after-dark imagery, adhering to the robbery theme, and it's a bit hard to tell precisely where you are. Clearly, it's some kind of street job with police cars arriving. But there is a cartoon mood as well, which blunts the edge. Diamonds strew the screen. They perch at the top of the paytable while the robbers and their bombs appear on the reels. Gold bars, a cash bundle, a vault door, a red bomb and a crowbar fill the middle of the table, with card ranks from 9 up to A below them. These aren't quite Betsoft's best graphics - I've certainly encountered more visually striking slots from the studio.

Bank robbing occurs on mobile, tablet, or desktop devices, by choosing a wager from 20 p/c per spin, and the game isn't quite an enormously volatile one. I ran mine from a 1,000.00 balance at a stake of 2.00. A moderate rating of 3 out of 5 means it can toss the occasional curveball or two. Only 110 of my 420 spins paid anything back, and 68 of those 110 came in below the stake. The RTP is listed at 96.08%. That figure is not printed anywhere in the game's own help panel.

Wins strike in Take The Bank when identical symbols land left to right from the first reel onwards, and only the largest win pays on each line. The paytable itself is displayed dynamically for whichever bet you have selected. Wins on separate lines are summed together, though. You'll welcome any assistance you can get too. My longest stretch without a single win was 18 spins, ending on spin 173. The wild symbol swaps for any ordinary pay to assemble a combination. It stands in for everything except the police car and the robber, and five wild symbols on a line are worth the same as five diamonds, the premier symbol of the game. Away from the feature, my next best spins paid 28.00 and 24.00, 14 and 12 times the stake.

The master bomb counter does the work

Central to Take The Bank is the master bomb counter. Betsoft's own panel describes the game as a progression played in rounds of ten. It's a bomb-shaped counter on screen at all times outside free spins, and it begins at 10 and falls by one every time you spin. Robbers deposit bombs on the reels as they land, and those bombs remain where they are. A robber will not land on a position that already holds a bomb. At 0 every bomb detonates and becomes a wild. At a given bet level that places a detonation on every tenth spin. Wins are computed after the blast, then the counter resets to 10 and the wilds vanish on the next spin, and the counter operates separately for each bet level.

There's a Buy Bonus too. All three levels award the same 15 free spins. It purchases the free spins directly and lets you choose how many wilds arrive with them, like so:

32.40 for 5 wilds.
60.00 for 7 wilds.
114.00 for the full 10 wilds.

Those costs are in cash at a 1.20 bet, and any ordinary win can also be put through Double Up, a heads-or-tails coin toss on half or all of it. It is repeatable as frequently as you like, until you press Collect to bank it. The one spot it isn't offered is after free spins.

Three police cars and 15 free spins

The last feature is 15 free spins. Three of them came up in the 420 spins I played. They are granted when 3 police cars are in sight, those showing on reels 2, 3 and 4 only, and the master countdown halts for the duration. The gap between my second round and my third was 160 spins. Each round is played with 5, 7 or a full 10 wilds scattered on the reels, granted randomly. My first round returned 13.60, 6.8 times the stake. The wilds shift to fresh positions every spin, and there is no re-trigger. A round therefore runs its 15 spins and no more. The free spins do not progress the counter, and the bet settings are the ones the round was activated on.

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Minty’s Final Note: Three police cars turned up three times in 420 spins and those three rounds carried 127.60 of the 509.20 that came back, a quarter of the total. The counter kept the base game busy in between, but it never lifted the balance back over 1,000.00.

What 420 spins returned

In a sense, Take Olympus resumes where Take The Bank left off. The bomb counter is amusing. Bombs picked up across a whole round all pay out at the same moment. Yet it seems the creator hasn't quite achieved a major game changer using it, and it should be noted that the rivalry in this particular category is fierce. Many providers have been toying with various methods on how to present sticky symbols and guaranteed wilds to players for quite some time now. In my run the feature accounted for 127.60 of the 509.20 that came back.

Take The Bank is neither poorer, nor notably better than its forerunners, and the gameplay is kind of intriguing. But the countdown-to-wilds notion is being executed elsewhere to better effect. Not trying to belittle Take The Bank here, some may favour the more conventional looking layout of 75 fixed lines.

Speaking of potential, the rules never place a ceiling on a spin or a round. They give no trigger frequency for the police cars and no hit rate either. The paytable is printed in cash at one bet level, so there is no payout figure to repeat as a multiple of the stake, and in 420 spins at a 2.00 stake I drew 509.20 back out of 840.00 wagered, a return of 60.6%. The balance closed at 669.20. The balance never got back above the 1,000.00 it started with. Its lowest point was 668.40. The three bonus rounds I saw paid 13.60, 42.00 and 72.00, a quarter of everything won. They arrived on spins 30, 153 and 313. The best of them was 36 times the stake. The best spin outside the feature paid 42.00, 21 times the stake, on spin 285.

When you add everything up, Take The Bank manages to come across as something a bit different, though it doesn't feel like a landmark slot. The session finished 330.80 below where it opened. It's more of a curiosity, which may charm some players as much as it leaves others cold.