Ted Free Play in Demo Mode by Blueprint Gaming

Ted review

Theme and Storyline

Ted is based on the Seth MacFarlane comedy movie of the same name, in which a teddy bear is brought to life by a childhood wish and grows up to be a foul-mouthed and lecherous pothead. The movie involves numerous wild shenanigans in which Marky Mark Wahlberg and his bear try to get their life together and avoid being kidnapped or losing the girl.

The game does not capture much of the movie’s content, even though it does use some of the audio of Seth McFarlane’s lines.

Instead, the slot reduces the film to a few logos, some beer, and the bear. So much, then, for the theme.

Graphics, Sounds and Animations

The visuals are surprisingly poor for a licenced game. Although the graphics are high quality with plenty of 3D shine to them, the overall design matches them together poorly with a boring background and uninteresting set of symbols on the reel.

The animations are technically impressive, but again they suffer from uninteresting design choices.

The music is a small loop of film soundtrack that tires almost immediately.

Gameplay

Ted’s base game is a classic five reel by three row slot with twenty win lines. This increases to a four reel slot in some of the free spin bonuses (details below).

In an effort to spice things up, there are a large number of randomised features and a fair few different bonus games to go with it.

Sadly, none of these bells and whistles seems to be enough to elevate the play to the level one would hope for from a slot based on a big-budget comedy film.

Wilds, Bonuses and Free Spins

The Wild symbol substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter symbol.

The Scatter symbol does not pay out, but three or more anywhere on the reels trigger the Thunder Buddies Bonus which will trigger one of five random bonus games:

• the Wheel of Fortune, which awards a lump payout;
• the Bar Crawl Bonus, which is a more involved game reminiscent of roll and move board games;
• the S Mart Free Spins, which is a standard free spin bonus with additional randomised Wilds;
• Ted Free Spins, which have additional bonuses that are randomised by where the player’s winning combos land;
• and finally there is the Ted Big Money Bonus which is more of less the same as the Wheel of Fortune but with bigger prizes.

There are also a series of features that are triggered randomly in the base game. These are triggered when Ted wakes up and include additional Wilds, additional Bonus symbols, and consolidating several reels into a single symbol.

Bet Sizes, RTP and Variance

The return to player of this game is 95.80%, a little under our yardstick for average of roughly 96%.

The range of bets on the site we tested ran from a minimum bet per spin of $/£/€0.20 up to a maximum of $/£/€200.00 per spin.

The volatility of this game is medium, which makes it a poor match for our preferred slot machine strategies. Our slot strategies target the highest possible volatility, and the low RTP here doesn’t make up for the middling variance.

Conclusion

Despite strong source material and a lot of production value on show, Ted fails to charm in the way it should.

The graphics are top notch but the design is shabby, the gameplay is full of features but somehow seems dull, and the RTP is much too low to be enticing.

If you are a fan of the movie, you might be willing to forgive this slot's many weaknesses, but we are not.