Review Ratings Process

Review Ratings Process

With thousands of online slot games available, picking the best ones to play can be difficult, but our team at SweepsPlays is here to fill the gap. To lead you in the right direction, we start by helping you find the best sweepstakes casinos to visit and then assessing the various slots you can find based on their payout, bonuses, and overall experience.

Our reviews cover the most crucial aspects of an online casino, including its game selection, bonuses, safety features, user experience, and payment options. In addition to recommending sites that perform excellently in these areas, we also ensure they’re trustworthy without legal issues or complaints from other customers.

How Do We Rate a Sweeps Casino?

The US sweepstakes casino market consists of trustworthy operators and bad actors. At SweepsPlays, we aim to protect you from these rogue operators while giving you all the tools you need to assess a sweepstakes casino successfully.

As a team of slot gaming experts, our primary focus is on the quality of slot games a casino offers. We cast a wide net to capture every detail, such as the developers behind the games, the RTPs being used, graphics, load speeds, bonuses, and available jackpots.

Next, we review its bonuses and promotions. We want a casino that offers an excellent bonus for new players and follows this up with massive ongoing promotions that showcase its commitment to the no-purchase-necessary rule of all sweepstakes casinos.

Once we determine a casino is worth a second look, we check its safety features. Here, we verify that the operator is trustworthy and known in the industry while paying attention to how it handles and protects your data.

The banking department is another crucial aspect of the casino, considering the end goal is to redeem your SC winnings. We check if the operator supports unique payment options like cryptocurrencies and gift cards, zero transaction fees, and low minimum redemptions.

We verify that a casino offers an excellent user experience through navigation options, customer support services, and filters.

Finally, to give a quantitative assessment of the casino, we assign a score to each area above. Here, we get a cumulative score by adding the scores for subcategories. For example, our game assessment has subcategories like the number of slots, return to player (RTPs), gameplay mechanics, developers, and jackpot options.

Ratings Overview


Sections
Games, Bonuses, Safety, Banking, User Experience

Scores
100 Points available in each section

Info
Every part of a casino scrutinized

General Ratings

Finding a reputable casino with top online slots is like finding a needle in a haystack, so we have specific areas to access. Our team goes through these areas with the hopes of narrowing down our picks to trusted casinos with a massive selection of high-quality games:

  • Games
  • Bonuses
  • Safety
  • Banking
  • User Experience

Each area is assessed based on different criteria or subcategories, and we provide an overall score out of 100 points.

Games

For a sweepstakes casino to make our list, it has to offer an excellent selection of online slots. We assess the types of slots, their mechanics (Megaways, Hold & Win, or Progressives), and the quality of the games.

We carefully assess the quality of the slots by playing them and paying attention to the developers behind each game. We look for casinos with games from industry leaders like Pragmatic Play, Playtech, NetEnt, RubyPlay, ICONIC21, Thunderkick, and Relax Gaming. Plus, if we find in-house game developers on the list, we do a more thorough assessment to ensure there is no compromise on the overall fairness and payouts from the casino.

Our experts at SweepsPlays understand that some game developers allow operators to adjust the RTP settings on certain slots, so we check what a casino offers. We always recommend games with high RTPs (96% and above) after confirming that the developer allows independent testing of its games. For crypto sweepstakes casinos like Stake.us, we check for the availability of a provably fair gaming mechanic.

With new games regularly appearing on the market, another requirement for any sweepstakes casino on our list is the continuous expansion of its library. An operator should be willing to expand its library through new partnerships and by providing quick access to the latest games from developers.

Areas that make up our Games Rating:

  • Number of Slots
  • Slots Variety
  • Game developers
  • Availability of progressive jackpots and table games
  • Slot RTPs
  • Mobile-friendliness

Bonuses

All sweepstakes casinos must offer no purchase-necessary incentives to their players, but they have control over the frequency and conditions guiding the use of the bonus.

At SweepsPlays, we assess the quality of a casino’s no deposit offers. Promotions like the new player bonus and ongoing offers like social media giveaways, daily login rewards, tournaments, AMOE, and referral bonuses should provide ample free coins for a casual player to use the site without purchasing a package.

We also go through the deposit bonuses to determine if there is value for every $ spent. On most sweepstakes casinos, you’ll receive 1 free SC for every $1 purchase, but with a purchase offer, you should get at least 3 SC for every $1.

Our team thoroughly assesses the wagering requirements and other conditions associated with a bonus. Top operators in the sector require you to play with the bonus at least 1x before you can redeem your winnings. Plus, we know about the SC expiry and typically recommend operators that allow you to store coins for 60 days or more.

Areas that make up our Bonus Rating:

  • Quality of no deposit welcome bonus
  • Ongoing player promotions
  • Value for money on coin packages
  • Bonus terms and conditions

Safety

We rate sweepstakes casinos with an operating license highly, but these sites are allowed to run without one. So, in addition to a license, our team has several creative ways to assess the safety of these operators.

First, we turn the spotlight to the privacy policies to determine how a casino handles your data. Top casinos ensure that third parties don’t have access to your data, and they use encryption technology like Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to protect your information. Also, we assess the casino’s compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and state-level privacy regulations since the former isn’t compulsory for US companies.

A look at the casino’s Terms and Conditions and Sweepstakes Rules also tells us a lot. For instance, a statement like “you agree to arbitration in cases of dispute” gets our attention.

In our safety assessment, we examine feedback from other players to get a larger picture. We also obtain the necessary information by visiting public forums, where users provide details on their experience at the casino.

Furthermore, we review the casino’s operating time and the quality of services rendered by its sister sites, if any. These details provide clear information on the operator’s reputation in the sweepstakes industry.

Areas that make up our Safety Rating:

  • Licensing (optional but great to have)
  • Data protection and encryption
  • General guidelines (sweepstakes rules and T&Cs)
  • Customer (player) Feedback
  • Time in the industry and reputation

Banking

Casual players on sweepstakes casinos can get by with the free coins they get, but an occasional purchase may be necessary if you’re more hardcore. Our task is to ensure you can find trustworthy payment options and one that meets your needs.

In the US, payment options like PayPal, cryptocurrencies, Skrill, Trustly, Paysafecard, Apple Pay, Google Pay, bank cards (Mastercard, Visa), and bank transfers are the most common. We always pick operators that support two or more of these options and offer cheap coin packages (from $0.99 to $1.99).

Our reviews also highlight casinos with excellent redemption options, like Gift cards, which have very low minimum requirements (as low as 10 SC). However, not all casinos support gift cards, so we consider other methods like online banking and cryptocurrencies.

If a casino meets our banking requirements, we examine the processing time. Most operators offer instant purchases, but instant redemptions are harder to find. However, gift cards typically offer the fastest payouts, followed by cryptocurrencies and e-wallets.

To complete our checks, we assess the transaction fees. Trustworthy operators are forthcoming with the details of the transaction fees, and most casinos we recommend don’t charge for purchases or redemptions.

Areas that make up our Banking Rating:

  • Selection of payment options
  • Transaction speed
  • Minimum purchases and redemptions
  • Transaction fees

User Experience

Sweepstakes casinos typically have an extensive slots library, with many operators having 500+ games. No one wants to scroll through 500 individual games to find the one they love, so we ensure any casino we pick has excellent navigation options.

We check for a filter option that lets you sort games by provider, bonus features, or mechanics. This is great for individuals who prefer a specific type of game or others who are biased toward slots from a particular developer.

As veteran slot players, we love casinos with a search bar. With this helpful tool, you can find any game you want within seconds, and it’ll come in handy for our readers who wish to find and play a game we recommend quickly.

After playing a particular game for a while, we understand that you may grow accustomed to it, and it becomes a favorite. For quick access to these games, we choose casinos that let you create a Favorites list, although many of our top recommendations automatically create this list based on your activity on the site.

Areas that make up our User Experience Rating:

  • Game filter option
  • Search bar feature
  • Favorites option
  • Game categories like Popular, New, and Jackpots

Summary

Our primary goal when assessing any sweepstakes casinos is to ensure they are safe, reliable, and worth your time and money investing in playing at. We make a concerted effort to fully research the range of online slots and games on offer and will only recommend the best Sweeps Casinos that have a comprehensive range of slot providers.

While online slots may be of high importance we take extra care to fully explore every single aspect of a Sweeps Casino in our reviews to ensure we are recommending what we deem to be those that offer you the safest playing environment.

We have done the hard work so go and explore the full range of our Sweeps Casino reviews, or discover all of the free to play slots currently available and find exactly where you can play them at recommended casinos!