Wild Outlaws

Wild Outlaws: Slot Overview

Yee haw y'all, we're off on a Wild West outing with software provider Light & Wonder in a six-gun shootin' online slot of theirs titled Wild Outlaws. The name 'Wild Outlaws' could be seen as a bit of a boast when you think about it, conjuring up images of badasses riding roughshod over the frontier, sticking up stage coaches, shooting up the saloon, and generally getting into all sorts of crazy shenanigans. With that in mind, let's mosey on into Wild Outlaws and see what sort of Western escapade the Light & Wonder team has cooked up.

Have to say, the first impressions weren't amazing. Wild West slots are preposterously numerous; barely a month seems to go by without a bunch of them being heaped on the pile. Light & Wonder themselves are no frontier first-timers, but you might think the opposite after a cursory glance at Wild Outlaws. It just looks kinda old, its classic one-horse town lacks personality or visual appeal, and the game struggles to kindle much of the genre's romance. The music's pretty neat, though.

Leaving the audio-visuals behind for now, Wild Outlaws is played on a 6-reel game panel; each reel holds 4 symbols, arming players with 4,096 ways to win. A medium-high volatile machine, wins are formed when at least three matching symbols land left to right, starting in the first reel, feeding into a default theoretical return value of 96%. Saddling up involves picking a base bet of 20 p/c to $/€10 per spin and whether to switch on the Gamble feature and the Premium Play mode. Both detailed below.

Metallic 9-A card royals step in as Wild Outlaw lower value symbols, awarding players a bunch of coins worth 0.4 to 1 times the bet for six-of-a-kind, or 1.5 to 10 times the bet when six of the boots, hats, skulls, or bags of gold land. Wanted poster symbols are wild, landing naturally on reels 2, 3, 4, or 5, or they can be added to reels 1 and 6 by the Wild Revolver Bonus. Wilds are able to substitute any normal pay symbol.

Wild Outlaws: Slot Features

The Wild Revolver Bonus may trigger (not guaranteed) when 2 scatter symbols land on the reels. When the feature is activated, the scatters turn wild, and 3 to 5 bullet holes are shot onto the game grid, which then transform into wild symbols.

Free Spins Bonus

Landing 3 Bonus symbols trigger the free spins bonus. Each Bonus symbol spins, displaying a number of 1-6. The numbers are added up to determine how many free spins are awarded. During free spins, 4 locked positions are added to the panel above reels 2-5. When a wild symbol lands on reels 2-5, after any win evaluation, a duplicate of it moves to the top of the reel, where it becomes a sticky wild for the rest of the feature. If a wild symbol moves up and there is already a sticky wild on the reel, the sticky wild is awarded a multiplier. The multiplier represents the number of wild symbols locked on the reel. If 2 Bonus symbols hit, the Wild Revolver Bonus may trigger. Or, if 3 Bonus symbols hit, the scatters spin to determine the number of additional free spins.

Premium Play

Activating the Premium Play mode increases the base bet by 50%. The benefit is when a win worth more than 1.6x the Premium Play stake hits, The Sheriff Bonus triggers. Here, 12 Sheriff badges appear on the screen, and players pick one to win a cash prize of x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, or free spins. If free spins are awarded, play returns to the base game where the reels spin, triggering free spins.

Gamble Feature

When the Gamble switch is on, the Gamble feature is triggered when 5x the stake or more is won. If Premium Play is active, the Gamble feature is triggered at 2.5x the Premium Play stake amount. The Gamble screen gives two options – double the current win or free spins. Players can adjust the gamble, collect, or keep gambling - up to a set limit. A maximum of 30 free spins can be won, and wins cannot be higher than 10,000x the bet.

Wild Outlaws: Slot Verdict

Presumably, it's possible to be wild and not be an outlaw, so is it just as possible to be an outlaw and not be wild? Probably, dunno, whatever; maybe Wittgenstein's language games were on our mind, but that's just one of the questions which arose while reviewing Wild Outlaws. Other ponderings arose, too, like, was this game made recently? Again, presumably yes, but darn if it doesn't look dated, and as can often be the case, it's hard to work out if the studio went for a retro look on purpose or not. Wild Outlaws looks like it could have come out years before the last Light & Wonder Western slot we reviewed, Wild Showdown, so who knows?

It's a shame because there are some interesting ideas going on here. Things like the Premium Play mode are intriguing, and it doesn't require huge wins to trigger, either. Get a win of more than 1.6x, and you're in with a chance to boost it from a multiplier or even trigger free spins, which did actually occur in the review, so it is a definite possibility. Even the Gamble feature is a temptation since it pops up on 5x the bet wins or higher – both of these add-ons have relatively low requirements for entry. As a comparison, Big Time Gaming's Win Exchange typically kicks in at the 25-100x range to gamble or the 100x swap for free spins. They have different gamblers in their scopes, no doubt, but both studios' methods have their merits, and Wild Outlaws' way of doing things feels like it would appeal to certain gamblers.

The rest of the features aren't bad either, so the deal breaker here would seem to be Wild Outlaws' outer wrapper and lack of strong personality, though beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that. If the game had more charisma, a bit more energy, or didn't look so dated, the good things Wild Outlaws does have might have shined brighter.