Shifting Seas Slot Machine – Free Play & Review

You might not be surprised by the presence of a pirate-themed slot machine in a casino’s collection, but I think you will appreciate Shifting Seas anyway. Through the quality of its design, and the attention of detail which characterizes Thunderkick slots, I think it’s worth looking into further. The action takes us next to a tropical island, the sort of place that pirates would gravitate towards. Obviously, we’re looking for buried treasures, and we’re using a setup that has 4-4–3-3-2-2 symbols initially.

While the first half of the paytable gives us fairly boring Royals, six of them and from 9 to A, the view gets better after that. We’re seeing parrots, old sailors, a woman holding a dagger between her teeth, along with a young woman as the pirate captain. Finally, there is also the top symbol, with the treasure chest holding gold coins and a huge ruby.

Developer

The developer for Shifting Seas is a company called Thunderkick. It’s only offering about 60+ slot machines right now, but they’ve been doing this for about a decade now, and they have a lot of experience with high quality content. I would recommend most of their games, including titles like Pink Elephants, Esqueleto Explosivo 2, or the Beat the Beast series.

How To Play It

You’re free to pick a wager that works for you, and there will be a range going from $0.10 to $100 that will give you the limits within which you have to stay.

It’s a setup with ways to win, using 6 reels which have only 576 ways to win (4-4-3-3-2-2 symbols). As the game area expands, it’s possible to have up to 7 symbols on all reels, and this could bring you 117,649 ways to win. A combination simply requires having 3 or more matching symbols on consecutive reels, which start from the leftmost column.

Special Features

The Avalanche is used when you have a winning combination. It will replace winning symbols with new ones, so that you have another shot at a win.

Another major feature to mention in this case, is the Shift Win. After every Boost Shift, the game removes the rightmost reel, and adds a new one on the left side. The symbols from the previous 1^st reel will be copied to this new reel.

Symbol Rush is a random feature which turns up to 8 symbols into a new type of symbol. As there are multiple symbols of the same type now on the reels, there are good odds that new combinations can form.

Another random feature is Wild Surge. It’s going to turn up to 3 regular symbols into wilds.

Special Wilds are symbols that land on the reels, and they become even more useful if they’re removed from the game area, or if they manage to contribute to a win. A Special Wild feature gets activated at that point.

To get 8 free spins, you’re going to need that a Bonus symbol is removed through a Shift Win from the reels. Retriggered, this feature gives you 4 more spins each time. You can get Wild Reels in this mode, starting from the 1^st reel and it will be pushed to the left side through Shift Wins. Its multiplier goes up each time this happens. Instead of being pushed out completely when it gets to the last reel, it will show up again on the 1^st one.

Maximum Payouts

Shifting Seas pays a fair amount if you get lucky. 15,000x the wager is a good jackpot, even if the volatility is high, as it is here. I’d mention its RTP as well, since there is a range with both high and low values. The RTP to look for is at 96.19%.

Summary

Shifting Seas is a good game overall, with the right graphics and top jackpot. I’m not a fan of overly complex features, and the ones included here require quite a bit of explaining, but that’s only if you want to understand what you’re getting yourself into.