Game in Action
Screenshot of the Football: Champions Cup Slot
If Net Entertainment had planned to go all out with their Football: Champions Cup, they should have invested more in the graphics. But we won’t complain. The symbols are understated and crisply designed, offering up football staples such as the whistle, a shoe, a goal keeper’s glove, a shirt and a stylized player. Standard card symbols make up the rest of the lot. The football ball is the Wild and the actual Champions Cup stands in as one of the Scatter symbols. The other one is an actual Bonus Symbol. As a nice little touch you actually get to choose a team before the game begins, which means you can play as your own country as long as it is in the UEFA.
There’s no background music at all, which might have been odd anyway. Instead we get the roaring crowd, which emulates the atmosphere in a stadium rather well, especially when you score a win. During the base game Overlay Wilds may show up every now and then, which offers some nice effects, because 2 to 5 footballs will randomly fly across the screen and settle somewhere, hopefully providing some wins.
Bonuses
There are two pretty elaborate bonus features available: the Click Me Shootout Bonus and the Free Spins Tournament. The launch the Shootout, you’ll need to collect 3 or more Bonus Symbols anywhere on the screen. The Free Spins are launched when you get 3 Cups on reels 2, 3 and 4.
Click Me Shoot Out: It’s basically a click me game. You’ll be seeing a goal and are asked to pick one of four positions to shoot at. If the goalie doesn’t catch your ball, you win cash. Then your opponent has to shoot and you will once more pick one of four positions, hoping that it’ll catch the opponent’s ball. If you manage to save, your multiplier will go up.
There are five rounds of that back and forth, but if you are tied in the end, you’ll get another round until you are no longer tied and one side wins. Also, the multipliers you are able to get depend on how many bonus symbols you managed to score to begin with. Three bonus symbols mean multipliers between 1x and 12x, four will get you between 3x and 14x multipliers and five bonus symbols mean 5x to 16x multipliers.
Free Spins Tournament: Here it actually comes into play that you picked a team to play as in the beginning. When the free spins are launched, you’ll see a tournament table. You start with the first round, which consists of 6 free spins. You’ll have to win the match in order to progress into the next round and you do so by hoping to get a Wild that will count as a goal for you (the Red Wild to be precise). Yeah, that’s right, it’s completely random, which is the only disappointing thing about this otherwise pretty great feature.
If you win the match, you’ll get into the next round, where everything is repeated. You get 6 free spins and have to hope for more Red Wilds than your opponent gets Blue Wilds. There will be four rounds of this in total, as long as you win every round. In the last round the winners are determined and you can land on place 1, 2 or 3, which will win you 500x, 100x or 20x your stake, respectively. In other words: you really want to win this one, because that’s a big payout.
Other Slot Machines You Might Enjoy
Summary
Playing Football: Champions Cup can be real hit and miss (pun intended), because you can have long dry spells without any bonus feature hitting and then you get plenty of bonus rounds all of a sudden. The Penalty Shootout is a little easier to get, because bonus symbols can land anywhere on the screen. But the Free Spins Tournament is definitely the more exciting and lucrative one, though it entirely depends on luck.
Overall Net Entertainment managed to deliver a pretty decent slot here with two fun bonus features. Whilst the graphics didn’t impress as, the background sound effects do give a feel of the stadium, which should delight football fans especially.
Our rating: