How to play

You can play from 20p a spin up to £50 a go, on your device of choice.
Cats, owls and spiders join the typical lower-paying playing-card values on the reels. The owl is your most rewarding standard icon, forking out at up to 25x wager for five in a row.

As usual, bag a win by scooping similar symbols, kicking off from Reel 1 and working from left to right.

Bat Stax slot special features

Special symbols

The witch’s hat, unusually coloured in purple, serves as your Wild here, replacing all other icons apart from the Scatter (a pumpkin). The wild shells out at an impressive 50x stake maximum for landing five on a line.

The black bat symbol is also important – and we describe it in more detail below.

Bonus features

The bat symbol

This is a special, overlaying icon which expands and can rock up on all five reels and pays up to 5x stake for five. Land a minimum of three and they’ll expand to full up the entire reel.

Get a trio of these icons on Reels 2,4 and 5 and they’ll increase to occupy Reels 1, 2 and 3. But if you manage to fill up the full complement of reels with the things, you’re in line for a payday worth 100x your stake.

Free games

This is the main course in Bat Stax. Play it when you bag between three and five of your pumpkin Scatters wherever you like on the reels. Your reward is accordingly two, 10 or a whopping 25x original bet, and you’ll be in line for a respective 10, 15 or 25 free whirls.

It can all happen again in the same way if you manage to retrigger the feature by grabbing a further three to five pumpkins.

While you’re playing this round, at least a couple of Bat icons expand to occupy all of Reels 1 and 2 – plus a wager-free respin follows as the other reels spin again.

If more bats land, they expand again, and the respins only stop when no more bats show up.

Jackpot

There is no progressive jackpot to be had in Bat Stax. Instead, the top haul is 1,000x stake with a quartet of Wild reels via the bat icon, plus a fifth reel taken up by the witch’s hat Wilds.

You’d be very lucky indeed for this to happen, however. It’s far more likely that you’ll land five bat symbols in the base game for a decent win.

Return to Player (RTP)

You should find Bat Stax to be a medium-variance affair. Return to Player or RTP is a little over 95%, so be aware that this is a tad below the average.

Verdict

This game has a nice design, and it’s a particularly good one to play at Halloween, although of course, you can enjoy it all year round.

Clearly, it’s not the only fright-themed game out there, and it isn’t exactly a mould-breaking offering.

But its slick gameplay and interesting set-up make it worthy of a second look nonetheless.