Twister: Slot Overview
Twister? The game where a spinner determines where participants place their hands and feet on a mat before curling up like a pretzel and falling to the floor laughing hysterically? Yep, the famous game, first released in 1966, has been brought into the gambling arena by software developer NetEnt in the online slot of the same name. How, you might be wondering, has the physicality of Twister been ported to the digital realm? Well, it hasn’t, really, but Twister is an enjoyable conversion, featuring many aspects of the physical game mingled with online slot elements and a return to the swinging past vibe.
NetEnt gives players a fly-on-the-roof view of the proceedings, where the game grid, covered in colourful circles and arranged like the classic Twister mat, can be scoped. The grid sits in a living room, retro-designed, with one of those sweet 60s armless sofas on one side and an archaic box of a cathode ray tube TV on the other. There’s something about the ’60s; perhaps it was the Space Race that makes it seem futuristic even though it is decades in the past. Not to mention the era’s hip optimism for the future, which can be hard to relate to in the times we live in. Not sure; let’s ponder that later.
Laid out on the living room floor is Twister’s 4×6 gaming area, which is a configuration you don’t see used often. Highly volatile, this might not be a chilled, laid-back, have-a-laugh with friends as they fall awkwardly over session, though the max RTP of 96.04% is a healthy average figure. Bets of 20 c up to a possible $/€100 per base game spin may be picked, as can a bonus buy, which gets you straight into the free spins round.
The Avalanche mechanic removes winning combos, making space for a new symbol drop to fill the gaps. Avalanches repeat until there are no more wins on the reels. Twister’s pay symbols are made up of J-A card rank low pays, then 2 males and 2 female characters as the higher value symbols. Three or four OAK combinations are possible and all combinations begin from the leftmost reel, while there are 1,296 ways to win.
Twister: Slot Features
Twister neatly incorporates parts of the physical game in its features, which include Avalanches, a wild generating Twister Spinner, free spins with a rising multiplier, and a bonus buy.
Twister Spinner
Twister Spinners may appear anywhere on the grid in the base game and in free spins, triggering the Twister Spinner wheel. The wheel has 4 sections split by body part, with 4 colours in each section. Each body part represents a wild type, and each colour represents the potency of the wild. Wilds substitute for all regular pay symbols.
- Left Foot – transforms the Twister Spinner into an upgrade wild, upgrading all low-pay symbols of a single type on the reels into a high-pay symbol, depending on the colour of the Twister Spinner.
- Right Foot – transforms the Twister Spinner into a multiplier wild, multiplying the number of bet ways passing through it with a multiplier value, depending on the colour of the Twister Spinner.
- Right Hand – transforms the Twister Spinner into a locked wild that remains on the reels for a set number of Avalanches, depending on the colour of the Twister Spinner. Locked Wilds do not stay between spins.
- Left Hand – transforms the Twister Spinner into a random wild, placing more random wilds on the reels, depending on the colour of the Twister Spinner.
Free Spins
Hitting 3 or 4 scatter symbols in the main game awards 6 or 11 free spins, respectively. During the round, hitting 2, 3, or 4 scatters awards an additional +1, +2, or +4 free spins, respectively, when Avalanches end.
At the start of free spins, a progressive multiplier of x1 appears on the screen, increasing by +1 for each landed Twister Spinner. All wins are multiplied by the current multiplier value, and the value increases before any win evaluations take place during that Avalanche. The progressive multiplier remains until the end of free spins.
Feature Buy
Players may buy a main game spin that lands 3 or 4 scatter symbols for the cost of 100 times their bet.
Twister: Slot Verdict
Some days you’re reviewing the uzhe, Irish slots, Egyptian slots, joker stuff, and other days you get something way out of left field like Twister. Really, whoever would have thought of putting the popular game into an online slot? IRL, Twister is a social event, putting your body into weird positions, getting intertwined with your opponent, until one of you goes down on the mat. The physicality of the experience would suggest it’s hard to recreate on a screen where no touching and little moving is involved. Kudos to NetEnt, then, for making a rather interesting rendition while giving players a chance to take a punt at the same time.
What works is the charming 1960s angle, seeing as that’s when the game was invented, and you can imagine what the game brought to social gatherings and so on back then. Is Twister still popular today? You’d imagine it is tougher to play these days, seeing as one hand is always out of action on account of perpetually gripping a cell phone, and bodily angles are harder to achieve if participants are fixated on seeing notifications pinging on the screen. That was a bit cynical, apologies because Twister the slot is about the opposite of a cynical game. Instead, with its 4,300x the bet max win, it provides a wee jolt of nostalgia and some fairly entertaining theme-linked features to boot.
Mediocre
Twister won’t have you ‘accidentally’ bumping up against your crush, but it’s a fun-loving translation of the popular game on the reels.