Sharks Blitz Slot – Free Demo

A reel set that runs 3-5-5-5-5-3

Sharks Blitz is an online slot from Playtech. The help screens title the game Shark Blitz, singular, while the lobby and the site carry it as Sharks Blitz. It employs six reels of differing height, 3×5×5×5×5×3, and 5625 ways to win. Playtech's other six-reel ways games are Buffalo Blitz and Buffalo Blitz Megaways.

I failed to slip into any rhythmic daze because the reels yielded so little over 270 spins, although visually, Sharks Blitz remains true to the timeless look and feel of the ocean theme. The longest gap between wins ran 16 spins and ended on spin 40. In terms of mechanics, it's an All Ways game. The two outer reels are three symbols tall against five on the inner four, and multiplying those heights out is where the 5625 comes from. Wins pay from the leftmost reel on adjacent reels, in any position, with only the highest win paid per combination, and all pays are multiplied by the coin bet. One Free Games Recharge symbol on the reel set does nothing by itself, since the trigger condition is three, so it sits there while an ordinary way win pays out around it. The coin value is the total bet divided by 25. At the 10-credit stake I played that put the coin value at 0.40.

The diamond, the Shark and the Recharge symbol

The wild is a diamond, and it substitutes for everything except the scatter. It only appears on reels 2 to 6. Because ways are counted from the leftmost reel, a wild can extend a combination but never begin one. The highest paying symbol is the Shark, awarding 60 times the coin bet for 6 of a kind. Six of a kind means the symbol has to land on all six reels, including the two short outer ones.

The scatter symbol arrives in the form of the Free Games Recharge symbol. It is the one symbol that ignores the leftmost-reel rule, because scatters count anywhere on the six reels. 3 anywhere on the reel set are enough to trigger the bonus, and other than this, there's not much more happening as far as symbols are concerned.

What the Recharge actually resets

Players need to land a minimum of 3 scatter symbols anywhere on the reel set to trigger Free Games, and this will award 8 of them. None of that happened across my 270 spins, because I never got three scatters on the screen at once. 4 scatters award 10, 5 scatters award 12 and 6 scatters award 15. Six scatters means one on every reel, including the two three-high outers. There's also a Trigger Crunch! Mode. It randomly places 2 scatters on the reels to improve the chance of triggering the round. Two placed scatters still leave the reel set one short of the trigger condition.

The bonus is possible to retrigger should you land 2 or more scatter symbols, as anticipated. It is the only thing that extends a round once it is running. The Recharge resets the count back to the original trigger value and increases the wild multiplier by 1 to 5 depending on how many scatters land, up to a maximum of x5. A round that started on 4 scatters therefore resets to 10 Free Games each time, not to 8, and once the multiplier is at x5 the help screen labels it maximum reached and further Recharges only reset the count.

Minty’s Final Note: Everything Sharks Blitz has above its way wins sits behind one condition, three Free Games Recharge symbols on screen at once. Across 270 spins at a 10-credit stake, 59 of them paid something and none of them was that.

270 spins without a trigger

When it comes to Sharks Blitz, I am in two minds. Across 270 spins at a 10-credit stake I bet 2,700 credits and recovered 953, a return of 35.3%. 10,074 on spin 5 was as high as it got, and the balance never returned there. The balance was slipping from 10,000 to 8,253 with no Free Games at all, and only 59 spins paid anything. That leaves 211 spins that returned nothing. 35 of those paid less than the stake, the best of the lot being 100 credits on spin 199.