The Wild West Bought to Life in This Money Burst Slot
Wild Shootout uses one of the more innovative reel setups you’ll find on the casino floor. Instead of a grid for the reels, these are in a cone shape with the narrow end on the left. There are 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and then 7 symbols fanning out towards the right. With 192 win-lines in total, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to line up cowboys, bullets and guns with playing cards.
Things get even more interesting in the main bonus feature – where nudging wilds come into play. The reels flip 180 degrees, which improves your winning chances.
Here are the key reasons to give the Wild Shootout slots a spin:
- Conical Reels: 192 win-lines, for just 50c an spin and up
- Wild Cowboys: Cover a reel in the cowboys, and they transform into extra wilds
- Free Spins: Sheriff badges trigger free spins, where the reels flip over
- Nudging Wilds: During the free spins, any cowboy on the reels will nudge to cover the entire reel
Two Types of Wild Symbol
There are individual wilds and full-reel wilds on the reels. The individual ones show a gun, along with some playing cards. These work in the normal way, substituting for everything except for the scatters.
Cowboys are the highest paying symbol. In the base game these come in long stacks. If they only partially cover a reel, they work only as regular symbols. If you cover all the spaces on a reel, then you get an animation where the word ‘wild’ is shot onto the reels several times. This reel then becomes completely wild. It is possible to get all the reels covered in wilds, or to connect reels with the regular wilds.
Wild Shootout Free Spins Bonus Games
Sheriff badges are scatter symbols and will trigger the free spins bonus. You need a minimum of 3 for 10 free spins – and will get a huge 100 free spins bonus for the maximum 5.
Two extras happen during your bonus spins. First, the reels flip 180 degrees. This puts the biggest reels on the left – giving you many more chances of lining up the 3 and 4 of a kind wins.
The second extra has the biggest benefit. Any single cowboy on any reel will expand to cover the entire reel. This will then become a wild symbol. With stacked symbols on all the reels, this is your ticket to triggering all 192 win-lines at once.
Those Sheriff badges are still in play, so retriggering for more free spins is possible.
Cone Shaped Reel Setup
I like the way that WMS has worked out the win-lines across the unusual shape of the reels. There are 192 of them, which fan out from the small left-side reel to the longer reels on the right. It only takes a few spins for this setup to become intuitive.
Wins over many of the 192 win-lines are common – with the biggest wins coming if you connect symbols all the way to the 6th reel. Wilds and cowboy wild reels certainly help with this.
Your biggest wins will come via the Cowboy symbols. The other high paying combinations are bandits, a lady, bullets and a bag full of dollars. A hat and the usual coloured playing card suits complete the line-up of symbols.
Bets start at 50c, which covers all 192 win-lines – and go up in multiples of this amount.
Classic Wild West Design of the Wild Shootout Slots
Once you get used to the unusual reel setup, you’ll enjoy some crisp artwork on the reels. My pick of the symbols is the regular wild. This shows a pistol, with playing cards (led by the ace of spades) with a green background.
Behind the reels, you’ll see a grassy plain with mountains in the background – with guns crossing the logo on the top left. When you hit the free spins bonus games, things get dark. At this point, a classic spaghetti western theme tune kicks in. There are only a few animations compared to many WMS slots. These include the cowboy becoming a single big symbol, with gunshots adding the word wild to this.
Should You Shoot for a Big Win?
Wild Shootout is not the only casino slot to use the unusual cone-shaped reels. This is also used on the popular Zeus 3 slots. With 192 ways to win for each spin, the two different wilds can be very profitable. When you hit the free spins, the reels flip. Once you see how easy this makes getting smaller winning combinations, and enjoy the nudging cowboy wilds, you’ll want to return to Wild Shootout and shoot for more wins!
