Hot Shots 2

A sandy forest football pitch welcomes back the animal cast of iSoftBet's original Hot Shots for this sequel, Hot Shots 2, still cheered on by a crowd around the edges of the grid. The reels themselves are no longer transparent, but the presentation keeps the same upbeat, cartoonish energy, backed by a bouncy soundtrack.

The game runs on a standard 5-reel, 3-row layout with 243 ways to win, and matching symbols pay when they line up across adjacent reels from the left. Highest paying is a beer-drinking German Shepherd, worth 10x the stake for five of a kind, with a chicken, bull, bulldog and fox filling out the rest of the premium tier; playing-card royals in a bold, oversized font make up the low end of the paytable. A football-shaped wild can land on the middle three reels, standing in for any paying symbol and expanding to cover its whole reel both vertically and horizontally whenever it appears.

Landing three, four or five Hot Shots logo scatters hands out 10, 15 or 20 spins in the bonus round in turn, and the round swaps the regular wild for a Golden Wild that keeps the same substituting and expanding behaviour while also adding one to a running multiplier every time it shows up. Landing further scatters during the bonus adds more spins on top. Separately, the Ultra Bet option lets a player pay 50x the stake for a batch of 50 quickened spins in which stars can land on symbols and get collected; the tally at the end converts into a payout, starting at 5x the stake for five stars and climbing to a 1,000x jackpot for fifteen. Should the free spins trigger during an Ultra Bet run, it plays out once the 50 spins are finished. A full grid of the German Shepherd symbol alone is worth 2,430x the bet.

Betting on Hot Shots 2 runs from 0.25 to 25 per spin. iSoftBet lists the RTP at 96.5%, though standard play without Ultra Bet active runs at 96.0%, reaching the higher figure only when Ultra Bet is switched on, and the game is rated high volatility. Between the expanding football wilds, the climbing free-spins multiplier and the flat-cost Ultra Bet route to a four-figure jackpot, there's more than one way to build a win here, with the Ultra Bet spins in particular offering a quicker, higher-variance path through a session.