Hoot Shot the Sheriff: Slot Overview
Giddy up y’all, Hacksaw Gaming pardner Backseat Gaming has saddled up for the Western-themed scatter pays slot Hoot Shot the Sheriff. Yes, that is meant to be ‘Hoot’, not ‘Shoot’, no typo here, as the lawman (or should it be law bird?) is a gun-wielding, take-no-nonsense owl in a cowboy hat character called Hoot. Not something you see every day in a slot. The same thing cannot be said about the gameplay however, which might not possess the most cutting edge innovations ever witnessed, but are nevertheless a bunch of straight shootin’, high calibre effects that suit the scatter-pays mechanic to a tee.
Backseat Gaming do like this part of the world, as the team visited this patch of earth in previous releases, Old Gun and Clumsy Cowboys. Hoot Shot the Sheriff is arguably the most desolate of the three slots, held out the back of nowhere where your only friends are dry, brittle grass and the howls of wild animals. For whatever reason, maybe the title came before the game, it does have an owl sheriff, though, looking all serious and whatnot with his hat and pistol. Other than the owl, Hoot Shot the Sheriff is a pretty stock standard looking Western slot held in the wilderness rather than on a town street or in a saloon.
This machine is highly volatile and is played on a 6×5 scatter-paying grid. When 8 or more matching symbols land anywhere on the reels, they create a winning combination that triggers the cascade mechanic and more. It is possible to stake 10 c to $/€100 per game round, and playing this way generates a theoretical RTP of 96.32%, though a lower return model is also available.
Hoot Shot the Sheriff’s pay symbols are triangles, diamonds, clubs, spades, and hearts as the low pays, then cacti, boots, money bags, and owls as the highs. Scatter wins made up of 8 matching symbols are worth 0.2 to 2 times the bet, up to 19+ OAK combinations paying 50 to 400 times the bet. Wild symbols are not in this slot.
Hoot Shot the Sheriff: Slot Features
Hoot Shot the Sheriff comes with fairly basic but punchy features such as cascades, a Global multiplier, multiplier symbols, a Midnight Gun Fight bonus, the Sheriff’s Hootout bonus, and feature buys.
Cascades, Global Multiplier & Total Win Bar
Winning symbols vanish from the reels, and symbols cascade down to replace them, giving players another chance to win. The Global multiplier increases by +1 for each winning cascade, and resets at the end of each base game spin. Cascades repeat as long as winning combinations appear. All wins are collected in the Total Win Bar. Sheriff’s badge multipliers and the Global multiplier are added to the Total Win Bar at the end of a spin, multiplying each other and applying to the total win amount.
Sheriff’s Badge Symbol
The Sheriff’s badge reveals a multiplier of x2 to x10, which is collected by the Total Win Bar at the end of a spin. Multipliers multiply each other when collected in the Total Win Bar.
Midnight Gun Fight
Triggering the Midnight Gun Fight and 10 free spins occurs by landing 3 scatters in the base game. The base game mechanics apply, except the Global multiplier is persistent for the round’s duration. Hitting 3 scatters in this bonus round or the next one awards +5 free spins.
Sheriff’s Hootout
Hitting 4 scatters triggers this feature with 10 free spins. This feature follows the base game mechanics, plus Sheriff’s badge symbols multiply the Global multiplier, which is persistent till the bonus round ends.
Bonus Buys
BonusHunt FeatureSpins can be activated for 2x the bet, making each spin 3x more likely to trigger a bonus game, or QuickDraw FeatureSpins at 50x each, guaranteeing at least one Sheriff’s badge lands. Midnight Gun Fight may be bought for 100x the bet, or Sheriff’s Hootout for 200x.
Hoot Shot the Sheriff: Slot Verdict
Scatter pays slots are so common, so popular these days that it’s not outside the realm of possibility to review them back to back. Indeed, this very phenomenon occurred with Hoot Shot the Sheriff, as the previous slot under the microscope was Relax Gaming‘s Bounty County, which, in a further twist, was not only a scatter pays slot but a Western-themed one as well. No doubt this was just a freaky coincidence, yet it was odd receiving the two games one after the other like that. The good news is the two slots are miles apart in the gameplay department, and where Bounty County aimed at being experimental, Hoot Shot the Sheriff has proven mechanics as its foundations.
As a result, players might not encounter scary original gameplay when taking on Hoot Shot the Sheriff, yet the features can nevertheless be highly effective. Brute force, one plus one equals two features, but effective all the same. You can see how Hoot Shot the Sheriff might have branched off something like Gates of Olympus, but here the rules are even less complicated. Hit a win, increase the multiplier, repeat and collect. It’s satisfyingly simple. The Sheriff symbol adds an extra element, and it’s a good one too, as any chance to increase the multiplier further is a welcome one, not to mention the value got quite high during the test sessions.
High enough to mentally visualise the game hitting its 25,000x win cap? Sure, why not. And so, gamblers looking for the next hot paradigm shift in scatter pay gaming probably are not going to bump into that sort of stuff around here. But, for a playable Gates alternative with a simply satisfying set of features which tie neatly together and can slam out wins like an excitable owl with a gun fetish, whatever that means, may well find them in Hoot Shot the Sheriff.
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