One of the benefits of having a super regular timetable of releases like software provider Pragmatic Play has is that when enough ideas are flung at a wall, some good stuff can stick. On the flip side, though, plenty of lesser ideas slide to the floor where they lie festering and confused, pleading with their maker to explain why they were spawned. One of the oddities to come from Pragmatic Play's factory line is Moonshot, which is one of those slots where you might have to suspend disbelief and just wander around for a bit in an environment rarely, if ever, before seen in an online slot to figure out if you like it. You never know; some may love the peculiarity on display here. Let's see which side of opinion we fall on.
First things first, Moonshot has absolutely nothing (as far as we can tell) to do with building a rocket, selecting the 'best of the best' to become astronauts, slinging them through a centrifuge for a bit of face-warping g-force training, then firing them into the cosmos atop one some the most frightening machines ever designed by the human mind. Instead, and apologies if we've got this completely wrong, but Moonshot looks like it's based on some sort of cultural (slavic?) festival or celebration with people wearing unusual masks, drinking cups of… tea? Really hard to decipher quite what is going on, so a detailed game sheet would have come in useful. Alas, no extra information was at hand at the time of writing, so it's up to willing participants to use their own minds to decipher exactly what is taking place, or attempt to decipher anyway.
For the willing then, Moonshot offers bets of 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, as well as a bonus buy option. It's a highly volatile game, and if you're on the lookout for the highest RTP version, the one you want clocks in at 96.5%. Played on a game grid with 5 reels and 4 rows, players are equipped with 1,024 ways to cobble together winning combinations.
Winning combinations are made when matching symbols land from reel number 1 across 3 or more adjacent reels (2 or more for the top premium mask symbol). Full 5 OAK wins are worth 1 to 1.5 times the bet when formed of the 10-A card ranks, or 1.5 to 4 times the bet for the higher value cup of tea, gourd, blueberries, plums, cherries, and mask symbols. Helping out here is the wild symbol, as it substitutes for all regular paying symbols. Wilds are present on all but the leftmost reel.
So far, so huh? Maybe Moonshot's features can pull something back from the confusion. Here we've got Golden Mask symbols, free spins, and the bonus buy to go over.
Golden Mask symbols are wild, sort of, appearing on reels 2 to 5, substituting for the top paying mask symbol only. Golden Masks also come with multipliers - the more masks displayed on the Golden Mask symbols, the bigger the multiplier. When 1 mask appears, the multiplier is x1; when 2 masks land, the multiplier is x2, and 3 masks represent a multiplier of x3. The multiplier applies to all winning combinations of the top-paying premiums symbol.
Landing 3, 4, or 5 of the coin bag scatters awards 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. In free spins, all masks and Golden Masks are collected when they hit. Every time 40 of them have been collected, the level increases:
When reaching Level 3, all remaining free spins or retriggers remain at this level. Hitting 2, 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols awards 5, 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. Finally, to buy your way to free spins, the cost is 80 times the bet, and the RTP is 96.5%.
So Moonshot, what's it all about? After a playthrough, one interpretation might be that the tea these people are guzzling down isn't of the Earl Grey or breakfast variety but something with a bit more of a psychedelic kick to it. Where sipping it sends drinkers far beyond the realm of relaxation to one which alters their perception of reality - an internal moon-shot, if you will. Now we could be way off the mark here and probably are, but darn it if that's about the best explanation we could come up with to explain what the heck is going on in Moonshot.
The gameplay is a lot easier to nail down and basically revolves around masks, Golden Masks and multipliers, then collecting them in free spins to level up. That's about it, really. There's nothing much to get too excited about if the mind-bending theme doesn't do it for you. It's hard to coax out many more words to dissect the Moonshot experience further than that. The game has a max win of 5,000 times the bet, which is all fine and dandy, but loads of Pragmatic Play slots have a figure like this attached, if not higher, so whatever.
Pragmatic Play is a studio which likes to keep the production line running white hot. Doing so does require a measure of original thought to keep the whole mechanism ticking over, fair enough. Sure, they can't all be Egypt, Leprechaun, or fruit slots, yet even so, let's just say Moonshot is not one of Pragmatic Play's finer releases. Moonshot might be of interest to players who really can't say no to unusual subject matter, but other than that, it's hard to think of many reasons to recommend it.
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