Badminton Hero Slot
- A sports slot based on the fast-paced game of badminton
- Interesting design with a few decent features
- Not a bad slot but very similar to other sports slots
Badminton Hero is a new slot from Microgaming that’s very clearly targeted towards those of you who enjoy sports and are athletic (pretty small target audience I’m sure!). Why they’ve chosen badminton I’m not entirely sure, perhaps it’s more popular than I realise, or perhaps it’s because many of the other popular sports have already been done.
I actually quite like the look of this game though, it’s certainly different to what many slots go for and is much more artistic, but I can appreciate that some people won’t really like it. The layout is very simple, just a 5×3 setup with nothing fancy going on around the reels. All you need to do is spin the reels to try and get a winning combination from left to right using the following base symbols which I’ve listed in ascending order based on their value:
- Badminton New (lowest value)
- Clipboard
- Shoes
- Racket and Shuttlecock
- Purple Player
- Blue Player
- Scatter
- Green Player
- Yellow Player
- Pink Player (highest value)
There’s also a Wild symbol shown as the Badminton Hero Logo which substitutes for all other symbols in the game apart from the Scatter symbol. The Wild symbols are stacked on reels 3, 4 and 5, and more than 40 of these will increase your chance to win. The Scatter symbol is shown as a trophy, and wins with this symbol are multiplied by the total bet staked.
Badminton Hero Slot Bonuses and Features
Rolling Reels Feature. This is essentially the Avalanche feature that we’ve seen on numerous other slots including the recently reviewed Jammin’ Jars slot. It’s very common among games that feature Cluster wins but Microgaming have included it here also so that any symbols that are part of a win will be removed from the screen and replaced by new symbols that will drop down from above, hopefully giving you another win especially if a Wild symbol falls down.
Wild Smash. This is a basic little feature whereby up to 2 reels on reels 2, 3 or 4 can turn Wild in order to guarantee you a win. This feature can occur randomly at any point.
Free Spins Bonus. As with most free spins, these are triggered y 3 or more Scatter symbols appearing anywhere on the screen. If 3 symbols appear, you will be given 15 free spins, 4 symbols will give you 20 and 5 symbols will give you the maximum number of free spins, 20. The good thing about this bonus, however, is that as you continue to use your free spins, a multiplier will be applied to the spins and this will increase as the bonus goes on. The multipliers you can get are 2x, 3x, 5x and 10x, the maximum you can get, and this will apply for 5 or more games. What’s more, it’s also possible to get the Wild Smash feature during this bonus, meaning that you could see some very big wins with those multipliers applied. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to retrigger the free spins, so you best hope you get a good number of them to start with.
Conclusion
Badminton Hero slot from Microgaming does actually have quite a lot going for it, with the potential for some big wins during the free spins bonus. I think they could have added some ways to trigger some additional free spins, even just a few, to really spice things up and make the game more entertaining. But aside from that, coupled with the artistic design of the slot, it’s actually a pretty solid game. Unfortunately though, it’s far from original. In fact, this is basically a copy of some other sports-related slots including Table Tennis Star slot or Rugby Star slot. So that makes it kind of hard for me to recommend because there are others out there like this and I don’t really think we need another one. That being said, it is a solid game and if you haven’t tried any of the others you should probably give this one, or one of them, a go.