EN
2 August 2024 
Shark Hunter Slot Review
There is a new game to add to the ever-popular genre of fishing slots. Despite being called “Shark Hunter,” rather than “Shark Fisher” it still has most of the trademarks of your standard fishing game; mainly that you need to combine fisherman (or in this case hunter) symbols, with the shark symbols. But Pocket Soft Games, an up-and-coming game developer, deserves much credit for putting a couple of twists from the standard fishing game.
Base Game and Feature
Shark Hunters is played on a 5×5 grid, meaning there are 30 individual spaces for the symbols to drop. You win by getting clusters of seven or more symbols. But unlike most cluster games, like Sugar Rush, the seven-plus symbols don’t have to be all be grouped together for a win. As long as there are seven of a kind showing on the 5×6 grid, you get a win.
The smaller symbols of Shark Hunter are your traditional deck of cards symbols: hearts, spades, clubs, and diamonds. From there you have fishing lures, fishing shears, tackle boxes, and brightly coloured fish, rounding out the premium symbols. Like most other fishing-themed games it doesn’t have a designated wild symbol.
The smallest base game win you can get is a 7-8 symbol cluster of the weakest symbols. This gives you a small win of “3” (not to be confused with 3 times your bet size). The highest win is if you get 28-30 of the biggest brightly coloured fish symbol, which pays 20,000. The max win on Shark Hunters is 5,000 times the bet size. Bet sizes range from £0.60 to a whopping £180 per spin.
Shark Hunter is also a cascading symbols game, so there is potential for wins to build up quickly on a single spin. If Shark Hunter has one major advantage over the Big Bass series of fishing games, there’s a higher potential for big wins in the base game. Quite often, fishing games feel like all the potential is in the bonus, but not so with Shark Hunter.
The cascades are the most important feature of Shark Hunter. It’s also where Pocket Soft Games spreads its wings and adds something new to the genre. You earn the shark symbols with each cluster win. Because of the cascading effect, you can easily get multiple sharks in one spin. Unlike other fishing games, where the fish symbols are random cash amounts, in Shark Hunter they are multipliers. Theoretically, the multipliers can range from 1x-50x, although the most common are 1x, 2x, and 3x sharks. The higher the multiplier, the more fearsome looking the shark symbol. For example, a 5x multiplying shark is shown as a hammerhead.
Mega Shark
Another unique aspect of the base game is you can get a “mega” shark that acts as a collector. If you get enough cascades and create five or more shark multipliers on the same spin, the mega shark will eat up the sharks and add together all the multipliers.
As in all fishing games, getting the fish (or shark) symbols are worthless if they’re not combined with the ever-important fisherman symbol. In Shark Hunter, the fisherman symbol is worth the same as your bet amount. So if you have one fisherman and a 5x shark, and you’re betting $2.00 per spin, you’ll win $10 off that combo.
Shark Hunter Free Spins
To trigger the free spins, you need three scatter symbols, represented by a fishing boat symbol. The scatters can land anywhere on the 5×6 grid. Additional boats add two extra free spins to the bonus round.
Unfortunately, the bonus round isn’t anything exciting if you’ve played other fishing games like the Big Bass series. This is where Shark Hunters falls back on old tropes.
The goal of the bonus is to level up your fisherman. So, if you land four fishermen within the first round (typically 10 spins), the value of your fisherman are increased by your bet size. So if you’re on a £2.00 bet size, it will be worth £4.00 in round two, than £6.00 in round three and so on. The goal in the bonus is like the base game. Get those cascades to create the multiplying shark symbols. Hope for big multipliers and lots of fishermen. It’s not a very exciting or unique bonus feature. But, then again, any bonus suddenly becomes exciting if you land a huge win, and this bonus feature definitely has the potential to pay.
Conclusion
If you enjoy fishing games (and a lot of people seem to big fans these days), Shark Hunter is worth checking out. It shares a lot in common with other fishing games, like the Big Bass series, while adding enough unique features to make it stand out. Fishing Games are in excess, after all, so any deviation from the norm is a very welcome one, even if just thematically. Shark Hunter definitely delivers in this regard, and it goes further to separate itself from your Fishing Frenzies and Big Bass Bonanzas in a meaning full way. With a 5×5 set up, cascading reels and Mega Shark features, it really does stand out. If you’re a pure statistician interested more in potential then Shark Hunter may tick the right boxes. At 5,000x the bet as a maximum win, it sits perfectly between what people may consider to be too soft, or too volatile. This as well as a 96.73% RTP value will undoubtedly make it a popular choice.
Overall, Shark Hunter gets a thumbs up from us. It’s not completely innovative, but it’s still very compelling.
Welcome Bonus
