300 Shields Extreme Slot Game with Bonus Buy Feature

300 Shields Extreme slot game, released by NextGen Gaming, is a sequel to 300 Shields slot game. As a long-time player of online slots, I remember the original 300 Shields game as being relatively “extreme” already! The title was well-known for its free spins feature, which had the potential to award a multiplier of 300x, and there were a few screenshots on internet forums of people winning truly enormous sums from this game.

Now I think about it, 300 Shields probably held the record for the highest win I’d ever seen – progressive jackpots aside – for many years, at around 45,000x the players stake. So how could NextGen possibly “extremify” 300 Shields any further? Let’s find out.

300 Shields Extreme Overview

If you were hoping to find 300 pay lines, Megaways, or some other enormous change had been made to 300 Shields Extreme, then prepare to have your hopes dashed. Like every other developer, NextGen had no choice but to update all of their old slots to use the newer HTML5 standard before Flash was officially discontinued at the end of 2020.

300 Shields was a moderately well-liked game in its day, but not enormously so – perhaps less popular than it should have been, in fact. So, when NextGen was forced to rewrite the slot using modern technologies, they appear to have decided a visual upgrade and the addition of a bonus buy feature would be enough to justify giving 300 Shields a superlative-subtitled re-release.

Spinning the Reels for the First Time

I hit the free spins feature on my very first spin of 300 Shields Extreme, which immediately gave me a good feeling about the title! That little coincidence aside, I also spotted that the option to purchase the bonus feature in this game was priced extremely low at just 60x your stake – the lowest I’ve ever come across so far.

The new graphics look fantastic, especially as I was already quite familiar with the original game. The higher resolution is immediately noticeable despite the symbols being precisely the same as before – it’s just a lot sharper and crisper, even on small-screened devices.

As you would expect from a game with the possibility of a 300x multiplier, there aren’t many massive hits on the pay table. Because of this, the base game of 300 Shields Extreme isn’t enormously exciting. You can at least win 100x your stake from hitting all five scatters, but that’s not going to excite many players. Sadly, these wins cannot benefit from the 300x multiplier either, as the shields serve a different purpose during Free Spins.

Free Spins Feature

Three or more scatters wins you the free spins feature, which begins with five free spins with a 2x multiplier. You only need to collect two shields to add another five spins at a 5x multiplier, but sometimes you will get unlucky, and your feature will end right here with just five free spins.

In my experience, most features do result in at least ten free spins, although getting all the way up to the top 300x multiplier is incredibly difficult. The problem is, while you only need to collect a couple of shields to add the second set of free spins to your total, you need another four to get to the 25x multiplier stage.

Reaching the fourth and final stage with the 300x multiplier requires a total of 13 shields to be collected during your first 15 free spins. One important thing to note about 300 Shields Extreme is that even when you have a lucky bonus round and manage the required number of shields, you don’t immediately jump to the 300x multiplier.

Instead, you always play exactly five spins at each of the different multiplier levels. This system means that you only ever get five spins during which to hit something at 300x, and more often than not, when I have reached the all-important final stage, I haven’t managed to win anything at all during the critical five spins.

It is always highly depressing when this happens, not least because it is so difficult to reach the final stage in the first place. The intro screen makes a big deal of the fact you can win up to 17,773x your stake on every one of the 300x multiplier spins, but in truth, hitting even one such spin is likely to be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

Bonus Buy Feature

The fact that the free spins feature only guarantees five spins is probably why the bonus buy feature in 300 Shields Extreme costs so much less than many other games, at just 60x your current stake.

Let’s say you are playing $1 spins, so pay $60 for the bonus buy feature. If you end up only receiving five free spins at 2x, you will probably feel a little short-changed.

If you had paid $100 for those five spins, as some games charge for their bonus buy feature, that feeling could be more akin to being ripped off than short-changed.

300 Shields Extreme – Our Verdict

300 Shields HD would probably be a more suitable name for this remake, but the original was always a fun game. That fact hasn’t changed with this re-release, and the bonus buy feature is a welcome addition to what was already a fun slot. It’s a shame the base game doesn’t have a bit more potential, but the excitement offered by the 300x multiplier make 300 Shields Extreme impossible not to recommend.

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