Riptide Pirates is a Nailed It! slot created for the Games Global slot catalog. The theme of the slot is quite obvious – this is a pirate bonanza. But not in the way you expect it to be. Riptide Pirates aims to bring something new to the genre, delivering a unique pirate experience while battling your sea-faring enemies.

It’s a highly volatile slot game with an RTP of 96.14% and 25 fixed lines. You’ll be hunting big prizes and four jackpots in the game with your ransacking crew of mates. The action takes place on a 5x3 setup with all kinds of modifiers and boosters and several special symbols. While it all looks and sounds complicated, you can still conquer the reels with wild stacks and nail down big wins with the special features and bonus rounds.

The most fun part of the slot is that you get to fire actual pirate cannons at your enemies in the bonus round. I’ve played my share of pirate slots and rarely any allowed me to do this. If you’re in for fiery battles while plunging boot out of the sea, read my Riptide Pirates review below.

At first glance, Riptide Pirates looks like a regular slot. With great graphics, of course. Nailed It! has ensured to make this slot look nice with sharp graphics and excellent animations across the grid. The symbols are directly linked to piracy, with flaming riptide skulls that tie into the special features and a crew of pirate mates.

A range of cannons and card royals, chests, and bottles of rum can be seen across the reels, too. A few boats make an appearance, too, allowing you and your crew to board the ships of your enemies. The reels are set against a blood-red background, which shows you’re in the middle of battle. That’s accentuated by the epic soundtrack and the excellent sound effects, especially during the bonus round.

Playing the Riptide slot is easy. All you need to do is set a bet before you hit the spin button. You can choose from 20c to $40 per spin and click on spin. The reels will turn with a nice animation, and those riptide-burning skull wilds should get to work almost right away. Per the math model, you need 3 or more matching symbols across the reels for a win. The lady captain and the buccaneer are the highest-paying symbols, with the riptide expanding wilds matching them in payout terms.

As usual, the wilds substitute for other symbols in winning combinations. However, they also expand on the reel to create even better-winning combinations. Each reel has a riptide counter below it. Every wild that lands is collected under the appropriate reel. A free riptide collection is added to the reels before the start of the game.

When full, the collection awards a full riptide stack, which moves one reel to the left for each spin. New stacks can be awarded on reels that are already occupied by another stack. When this happens, you get an x2 multiplier or increase the multiplier by +1.

However, for all the fun riptide wild stacks offer, the main focus in this slot is the pirate bonus round.

Land 3 monkey pirate scatters to trigger the Pirates bonus feature. The bonus is played on a larger grid with 1-4 active cannons. Each cannon has 3 chances to hit a target, with hits resetting the counter back to 3. As expected, the targets are enemy ships, and they come in 4 sizes, corresponding to the jackpots on the left side. The larger the ship, the larger the jackpot. In order to sink your enemy, you’ll need to hit all of the ship sections with the cannons.

Right above the reels, you’ll see the bonus booster. Each pirate symbol adds to it. When you fill up the bar, you’ll unlock up to 4 cannons. One cannon is guaranteed for the bonus, but depending on how many scatters you’ve collected, you can have up to 4. More firepower means more sinking ships and bigger prizes.

Besides the cannon-shooting action, you may also land chests with instant prizes, boats that pay up to 10x, extra prizes or treasures during the bonus round. Special symbols can double all prizes on the grid, add more ships to the map or help you score a direct hit on a ship.

Pirate-themed slots can be a hit or a miss, but this one is a massive hit. I had fun straight off the bat when playing Riptide Pirates for real money at my favorite real money casino online, hitting big wins with the randomly added riptide stacks before the first spin. I can say that the riptide stacks feature occurs much more frequently than you think, so the high volatility doesn’t play into it.

It didn’t take long for me to fill the riptide bars on reels 3 and 5, which led to a few consecutive big wins. This is like a bonus feature before the actual bonus, so it can be quite rewarding. Getting to the bonus round took a while, but I had fun blasting the ships. Overall, I ended up hitting the 50x jackpot on top of other prizes, which took me over 100x in bonus winnings.

Riptide Pirates has an RTP of 96.14%, which suits the high volatility. The maximum win is projected at 5,000x for the Max jackpot.

Riptide Pirates blasts other pirate-themed slots to shreds with its fun gameplay features. The riptide wild stacks are loads of fun and so is the bonus round. Which other slot lets your blast your enemies while earning incredible rewards? Not too many. That’s what makes Riptide Wild so great and why it’s worth a try.

If you like an alternative, you can try Pirates Party by NetEnt or Pirate Golden Age by Pragmatic Play. They offer different gameplay features, although, in my opinion, Riptide Pirates is much better.