Purrfect Pets

Net Entertainment has built a lot of games based on great graphics and gameplay concepts, and that's exactly what you get with the Copy Cats slot. The basic idea behind this game is that there are cats that can duplicate themselves across the reels in certain situations, and this leads to opportunities for big wins. It adds some chances for huge wins in a pay structure that would normally be seen as having a low volatility, so you can get that smooth type of gameplay with added opportunities for more sizable wins.

Slot Format

The layout of this game is pretty standard with 25 paylines spread across five reels and three rows of symbols. In typical NetEnt fashion, betting is set up with static paylines, but the coins go down to $0.01 apiece. They also run up to $0.50 on the upper end, and since you can bet as many as 10 coins on each payline, you'll have a good range of bet sizes to choose from. You only need $0.25 per spin minimum to play this game, so it's well within the reach of even low stakes players.

The Significance of Stacked Symbols

The top four symbols in this game are cat symbols, and one of those is the wild, which we'll take a look at below. There are stacked symbols on all reels that come at random, but when you get stacked cats on the first reel that cover all three spaces with the same symbol, you'll activate the main feature in this game.

The Copy Cats feature is where the name of the game comes from, and here's how it works. Whichever symbol appears stacked on the first reel will "copy" over to every other cat symbol on the other four reels. This gives you serious opportunities to make several winning combinations, including five-of-a-kind wins. What makes this even more valuable is that it's set up in a way that it's the wild and the three highest-paying symbols that can activate the feature, so you're playing for the largest payouts in the game when this feature is triggered.

Free Spins Bonus Feature

To give you a little more value, there are also bell symbols that show up on the first, third and fifth reels. When you get all three of them on the reels at the same time, they activate a set of 10 free turns. You'll be able to pick up another set of 10 if you re-trigger the feature during the free spins bonus round, which adds even more value.

Wilds and Top Symbols

The golden cat symbol is the wild, and it appears with a giant ball of golden yarn. This is probably the holy grail of toys for cats, and here they show up on all five reels giving you chances to get extra wins. They do not get their own payouts, and they do not substitute for the bell bonus symbol that activates the free spins bonus round.

Aside from that are three other cat symbols. You can pick up 200x for five of the red cat, and a prize of 150x is yours for five of the purple cat. The blue cat, who looks a bit grumpy, is responsible for a 100x win if you pick up five on the same payline.

Low-tier Symbols and Prizes

The high-tier symbols all have squares around them, and along these lines, you can tell the low-tier symbols by the fact that they are all circles. The wind-up mouse toy symbol gives you 75x for five, and five of the milk symbol will earn you 50x. The fish bones get players 30x with five on a payline as well.

On the payout structure in general, we aren't really a fan of how low the pays are for the bottom couple of symbols. A win of 30x for a five-of-a-kind payout (for the fish bones) is one of the lowest we can remember ever seeing, and we might be worried that it could be low enough to cause resentment from players in some cases.

In Summary

Net Entertainment has a really great concept with Copy Cats, and they've tied the visual aspect, the characters and the gameplay features all together with the name. This is the typical clever nature of NetEnt when it comes to designing a slot. As far as this game itself goes, we do have some minor complaints about how the bottom end of the pay table is structured, and we would have preferred larger pays for five of a kind of the lowest symbols. However, the top pay is just 200x, and the hit-rate is so high that it's hard to complain too much.

Overall, if you like games with a high hit-rate, you'll probably get a lot out of the Copy Cats slot.