Spirit Casino

Spirit Casino Review

Mmm, can you smell that in the air? Nope, it doesn’t smell like teen spirit, though you’re halfway correct. No, it’s the ghosts of casinos past, here to haunt you and bestow upon you great riches! Or perhaps steal them away? Things always go one way or the other at haunted casinos!

In all seriousness, aside from its striking theme and cool name, a pretty mixed reputation with players, as does its parent company Dama N.V. That’s precisely why we at CasinoAustraliaOnline chose to give it a thorough and compehensive review, to see if the site stands a ghost of a chance at being redeemed! In the process, we examined the bonuses, games, payment options, legitimacy, and many other aspects of Spirit, all for the sake of either recommending it to you, or warning you to stay away like the old man at the beginning of every horror movie!

Bonuses

Welcome Bonus – 100% Match up to AU$2,000 + 200 Free Spins

Many players consider the welcome bonus of an online casino its most important one, and that’s very much by design – after all, this bonus comes into play at the most crucial moment. When players are just deciding whether to put their money into the site, it responds by saying “hey, if you do I’ll give you this” – and sometimes (as is the case with Spirit), “this” is not just one bonus, but four!

To be honest though, even if it was just one bonus, we would’ve been pretty happy with it. And how could we not be? When you put down your first deposit, you’ll receive a 100% match up to AU$2,000 – the match percentage isn’t anything spectacular, but the maximum bonus amount you can receive is generous enough to easily satisfy high rollers! Not only that, but you’ll also get 200 free spins on Big Bass Splash (delivered in daily batches of 40), which means even regular players will be pretty happy here!

The one downside of this entire bonus are, sadly, the wagering requirements, which are pretty rough: both the bonus amount and the free spins winnings must be played through x40 times within just 7 days. This isn’t that much higher than average (most casinos hover around x30 to x35), but the fact that you only have 7 days will make the process much more challenging. Still, if you’re not intimidated, be sure to use the bonus code “SPIRIT” with your first deposit to receive the bonus!

Additional Welcome Bonuses

The first deposit bonus here is already pretty fantastic (wagering requirements aside), but it’s also just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll receive three more after this, each with one of your subsequent three deposits, but only if you input the appropriate bonus code – so watch out for that! Since the bonuses are all very similar structurally and all that changes are the amounts and codes, we won’t describe them one by one.

Instead, have a look at this handy-dandy table we’ve prepared for you:

It’s honestly quite surprising that three of the four bonuses here will reward you with a 100% match – most other casino sites, including those owned by Dama N.V., will dramatically lower the match percentage, sometimes down to just 25% for the last bonus. Here, it just keeps increasing, which is an excellent sign, especially coupled with the much higher maximum bonus amoutns you can receive – even if the free spins sometimes vanish like spectres. Alas, the wagering requirements will remain as high as ever, hovering at x40 within 7 days for both the bonus amount an the free spins winnings.

Reload Promotions at Spirit Casino

There’s no doubt about it: the welcome package here is pretty fantastic, But it’s also limited to just one use, and after that, it’s gone forever. If you want to keep playing with bonus cash, you’ll have to rely on Spirit Casino’s reload promotions, which – just like the ghosts inhabiting the site – will keep coming back over and over, allowing you to claim them multiple times. And (again, like the ghosts) there are quite a lot of them!

To be more specific, Spirit Casino has seven different reload promotions, which is an absolutely fantastic number that will guarantee you’ll not only get plenty of bonus cash and free spins, but those offers will also be diverse enough to not get stale after a while. Take, for example, the Monday Reload, which will net you up to a 100% match, and the match percentage increases with your deposit AU$30, AU$50 and AU$100 will get you 30%, 50% and 100% respectively.

And if you prefer free spins, how about the Tuesday offer, which will give you an unlimited amount of them. You can get up to 200 free spins at a time with a deposit of AU$100 (smaller deposits will have fewer spins), but since you can claim this bonus as many times as you want throughout the day, you can get even 5,000 spins if you’re so inclined. We must also mention the live reload offer which isn’t tied to any day of the week, but rather, once activated, will give you a 50% match up to AU$1,000 – utterly wild for a live dealer bonus!

Games

Even though the bonuses of Spirit Casino are really great, ultimately they’re not the reason why someone would want to sign up for an online casino. That reason is, of course, the games – and Spirit manages to do exceedingly well on that front as well! The site ultimately doesn’t have anything too unique – its attention seems to be almost laser-focused on pokies, live casino titles, and some instant win titles. As far as we can tell, there’s no sports betting, lotteries, scratch cards, bingo, or other features which can sometimes be found at casino sites.

However, those two present features (which are what most players would be interested in playing anyway) are not only extremely well put together, but also put many other online casinos in Australia to shame. You’ll find thousands upon thousands of pokies from different providers, as well as hundreds of live dealer games, all very neatly organized and easy to find. It might not be enough for everyone, but it should certainly satisfy most.

Pokies

The pokies section is quite honestly on par with some of the best we’ve reviewed, to the point where we’re confident that it’ll appeal to anyone who is interested in slot games. Let’s say you’re a veteran player who wants to enjoy the big games – you’ve got Yggdrasil, BGaming, Betsoft, IGTech, and many other popular providers. There are a few omissions, but for the most part, it’s a very respectable selection. And if you’re sick of those games and would rather focus on the hidden gems, there’s no shortage of those either: Hungrybear, Flatdog, 100HP Gaming and other smaller providers are right there.

But let’s say you’re not a veteran, but a brand new player who hasn’t even heard of those names yet. No problem! You can enjoy the recommended or most popular pokies here, but alternatively, you can also filter them out by categories like jackpots, bonus buy and megaways. As long as you have even a vague idea of what pokies you’d like to play, chances are you can find them very easily.

Live casino

Although the live dealer offerings here aren’t quite as good as the pokies, they’re still pretty respectable and will offer plenty of rooms and variants, especially for the three most popular games. If you’re a big fan of blackjack, roulette, and/or baccarat (and chances are you are if you’re reading this section), then you’ll encounter hundreds of rooms for those titles across a number of different provers, including BeterLive, EnjoyGaming and Winfinity.

The issue is that if you’re looking for something else, for example live game shows (like Megawheel or Deal or No Deal) or smaller games like craps or andar bahar, you sadly won’t find them here. Sure, you might find the odd room or two for them, but it’ll be extremely rare, and the site itself doesn’t have a section for anything except the three “main” games listed above. Which we know can be disappointing for some players, even if it’s unlikely to be a deal breaker for most.

Deposits & Withdrawals

Many international casinos which also happen to operate in Australia (but don’t have a dedicated version) tend to… not exactly prioritize the payment options we Aussies commonly use for deposits. Spirit fits into that category perfectly, since it seems to emphasize foreign payment options (like Interac) way more than ones that are available here. Despite this though, the choice of payments is ultimately pretty decent.

For example, besides credit cards and your bank account, you can also use several e-wallets to complete your transaction: Skrill, Neteller, Ecopayz, Mifinity, and MuchBetter. If you don’t want to tie a permanent payment option to your account though, the other option is prepaid vouchers: Neosurf or Paysafecard. Sure, you won’t be able to use them for withdrawals, meaning they’re a short-term solution, but they’re great if you don’t trust the site quite yet.

As for crypto, sadly this is the part where Spirit falters a little bit, as the options are mostly limited to the big, recognizable names: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Tether, etc. If you were looking for something a touch more “rare”, like Cardano or Ripple, you won’t find it here, which is a shame because many of these currencies can be much faster and more reliable than something like Bitcoin.

Withdrawal time

Although making a deposit at an online casino is pretty quick and simple, with the money typically available in your account instantly, things aren’t quite so quick when it comes to withdrawals. Not only will you need to deal with verification the first time you do it (which we’ll talk about in a bit more detail later), but you’ll also need to wait for the casino to “process” the transaction. That, according to Spirit’s terms and service, can take up to 3 banking days.

But your money won’t immediately end up in your pocket as soon as those three days pass – at least, not necessarily. If you withdraw via crypto or e-wallet, then the wait time past the processing is actually just a few minutes, so the process is about as quick as seamless as it gets. On the other hand, if you choose a credit card or bank transfer, well, prepare to wait for 3-5 extra days. Banks are slow!

VIP Program

Frankly, the VIP program of Spirit is… very confusing, and we couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Which should be quite telling, since we literally do this for a living! But allow us to walk you through our experience: in the left-hand menu, the site will have four different banners: Fortune Drops, Lucky Box, Lucky Spin, VIP Program. Amazing, VIP is what we want, right? Except, when you go there, you’ll just get a message saying “The event is over” – and it also doesn’t seem like the kind of program where you level up to obtain perks anyway.

Next, we checked Lucky Spin, an initiative where you can spin the wheel and get a random reward if you deposit a certain amount with a bonus code (as low as AU$30, as high as AU$90). Lucky Box works the same way, but with a chance to win a fixed reward instead of getting a random one. The twist is that, if you make it to Bronze in the VIP program, you’ll unlock even better wheels or boxes for deposits up to AU$500. Great! So there IS a program which lets you advance through ranks and gain perks after all!

Except, when we selected “Read More” within that same page, it took us to a page that basically said “hey, if we like you well enough, we’ll invite you to be a VIP” with no information on levels or even what being a VIP entails specifically. Ironically enough, Fortune Drops (an initiative where you can get a daily reward with each deposit) might just be the closest Spirit has to an actual VIP program!

Tournaments

After the utter confusion of the VIP program, we fully braced ourselves for an utterly nonsensical tournaments page – but believe it or not, this is actually one of the best aspects of Spirit! If you’re a fan of spinning pokies competitively, you’ll be pretty pleased to learn that the site offers multiple different ways to do just that: we counted six different active tournaments as of the time of writing, five of which exclusive to the site.

Not only that, but occasionally there will be much bigger tournaments themed around certain holidays, like Christmas or Valentine’s Day. These tourneys sit outside the main “tournaments” page and instead have their own page, as they also carry much bigger prizes. Granted, such competitions will be pretty rare and not always available, but the fact that they’re here at all is pretty greatand well worth praising!

Verification

With the advancement of new payment methods (like e-wallets and crypto), we’ve also seen the rise of new ways of committing financial crimes, like money laundering. For example, imagine that you’re someone who just sold weapons to a modern Don Corleon and want to buy a house with the money – but if you go to the bank, you’ll be asked a lot of questions. So instead you could buy crypto with it, deposit it at an online casino, withdraw it, tell the bank it’s just casino winnings, and boom, the cash is now clean! That’s money laundering in a nutshell.

To prevent it from happening, casino sites have a number of safeguards in place, one of which being that all money deposited into the casino must be played through once to be withdrawn. Another is verification, which will require you to link your real world identity to your account before you can withdraw anything. This one time process will only activate at withdrawal and will require you to send photos of your ID (and some other documents, like a proof of address), thus making it much harder to conceal suspicious transactions.

Is Spirit Casino Legit & safe?

Glancing at the footer of Spirit Casino, you won’t find even a mention of a license – or an owner for that matter. Going into the terms of service or about us sections, none of them give even a hint of who the owner is… which is typically a very bad sign. However, we at CasinoAustraliaOnline never leave a stone unturned, and so researched the site very carefully. Eventually, we discovered that it not only has a Curacao license, but it’s operated by Dama N.V., a rather significant casino operator.

Dama has dozens of sites under its belt, though unlike other companies which just use a very similar ‘template’ for each casino they own, Dama’s sites are pretty distinct from each other, making them harder to identify. We have, however, confirmed the connection – and Dama’s ownership of a valid Curacao license. As for why that information isn’t presented plainly in the footer of the casino, frankly, we’re not sure. But it’s an alarming trend that we’ve noticed many times in recent online casinos operating in Australia.

Customer support

If you encounter an issue with Spirit, be it something with the site itself (like certain games showing up as ‘unavailable’ or being unable to log into your account) or with the financial side of things (like your bonus or deposit not being reflected into your account), then the best people you can turn to for guidance are Spirit’s customer support themselves. You can do so in two ways: via live chat or email, both options accessible through the support page.

Although the live chat support here isn’t terrible (certainly better than that of other sites we’ve reviewed), our recommendation would still be to use email, especially if you have a more serious issue. Anything regarding finances (particularly for withdrawals) should go through email support, since it has to be viewed by higher-level support agents. It’ll be a little slower, sure, but the wait will be worth it.

Mobile casino

Every online casino site has a mobile version, but most rely on “web apps” to get there – basically, it’s the site viewed from a mobile browser, or sometimes wrapped in a way that makes it look and function more like an installable app. Spirit Casino, at a glance, seems to be exactly like this, as when you open up its mobile page, it’ll clearly explain how to add a shortcut to the mobile site to your home screen for convenient access. Nothing weird there!

No, the weird part comes from the fact that Spirit also offers two downloadable apps, one for Android, one for iOS. What’s particularly interesting is that the iOS app shouldn’t even exist, because (at least as of the time of writing) Apple still don’t allow sideloading most apps – and even if they did, the download link for the iOS version leads to an .apk file, which is specifically intended to work on Android devices. Installing it on an Android phone didn’t seem to do anything, so frankly, this is almost certainly an outdated version of the app that hasn’t been supported in a while. Why it’s still on the site is anyone’s guess, though.