Wild Moon Saloon

Wild Moon Saloon: Slot Overview

Grab your boots, folks; here comes a Wild West whirl on the reels courtesy of Stakelogic partner Hurricane Games in an online slot called Wild Moon Saloon which bigs itself up a bit, and comes with a stack of features such as four Wild Modifiers, Super Stake, free spins with a Bonus Pick round, and a base game Mystery Bonus. Does it live up to its hype?

The game sheet invites players to step into the Wild Moon Saloon, the 'wildest saloon in the wild west', though this won't actually happen until free spins are triggered. Until then, you're stuck outside on a browny/golden-hued street in one of the many towns which popped up throughout the Wild West. Hurricane Games presented Wild Moon Saloon in a cartoon manner, which works like a charm, as does the soundtrack. Though when it comes to Western soundtracks, as long as there's a twangy guitar and some whistling in there, you're pretty much set. Still, the mood it sets is a good one.

Playable on any device, Hurricane Games calls Wild Moon Saloon a highly volatile slot, rating this math model characteristic a full five out of five. The game produces a default return to player value of 95.8%, and there's no mention of whether this changes when activating the Super Stake or buying free spins, so it presumably stays the same. Regular stakes vary from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, or double when Super Stake is activated. When Super Stake is active, more scatter symbols are placed on the reels, making free spins more likely to be awarded.

Wild Moon Saloon is played on a 5x4 game grid with 40 paylines for landing matching symbols along. A bunch of grim-looking characters appear as the premium symbols. There are four of them, paying 6 to 12.5x the bet for a five-of-a-kind win. Payouts drop to 3.5-4x the bet for hitting five bottles or hip flasks, then 2-3 times the stake for five J, Q, K, or A card royals. It couldn't be a Wild Moon Saloon without a wild symbol, and wilds appear on all reels. They substitute any pay symbol and are worth up to 15x the bet for a line of five wilds.

Wild Moon Saloon: Slot Features

In the base game, players can look out for the Mystery Bonus symbol to mix up the flow, while free spins can be won or, in some cases, bought where win multipliers, scatter symbol wins, and Wild Modifiers can be added via a Bonus Pick feature.

Bonus Game

Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols awards 8 free spins with 3, 4 or 5 picks, respectively. Players then pick down turned cards to reveal four types of rewards:

• Extra free spins.
• Increase the value of the win multiplier.
• Turn any high pay character symbol into a scatter pay symbol.
• Activate one of the Wild Modifiers for all free spins.

If scatter pay symbols are active, then after any normal payout has occurred, having 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15+ scatters are in view, awards 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 7x, 8x, 10x, 12x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, or 100x the bet, respectively. Moreover, wild modifiers come in four forms. These can be Random Wilds, where up to 7 wilds are added to the grid. Exploding Wilds where up to 3 wilds are added to the grid and they remove up to 4 positions around them. Wild Reels, which turns up to 3 reels into Wild Reels. Or the last one, Rising Wilds, triggers respins when wild symbols hit, and the wild moves up one position on each respin before falling off. When no more wilds are in view, respins end. Lastly, during free spins, landing 2 or more scatters awards extra picks. You get 1 pick for getting 2 scatters, plus 1 pick for each scatter after 2.

Mystery Bonus

On any base game spin, the Mystery Bonus can randomly activate, awarding one of the Wild Modifiers mentioned above for that spin.

Bonus Buy

Players in applicable jurisdictions may have the option of buying their way into the Bonus round. The cost is 80x the bet to guarantee 3, 4, or 5 scatters land in view.

Wild Moon Saloon: Slot Verdict

Not saying Wild Moon Saloon didn't have its moments, but in the pantheon of Wild West slots, it doesn't take long to find several that outgun Wild Moon Saloon. An image came to mind of something like Dead or Alive 2, the Money Train Franchise, or Tombstone RIP, pulling out a pistol and shooting at Wild Moon Saloon's feet to make it dance around a bit. We mean that in the kindest possible way because Wild Moon Saloon was fun to tinker with, yet calling it the 'wildest saloon in the west' is a boldly optimistic statement.

What works is the cartoonish graphics, the rich soundtrack and having a stack of features to go through. We didn't see many of them light up the base game, but with the Super Stake on, free spins triggered at an impressive frequency. From there, Wild Moon Saloon might start to lose some of you. The reason is that the picking feature tended to favour extra free spins over everything else, in a similar way experienced in Yggdrasil's Golden Fish Tank 2 Gigablox or Thunderkick's Wild Heist. Fine and dandy though mixing in more of the other features might have been nice. Wild Modifiers especially were tough to get a hold of. And while we're at it, the scatter pay feature is a little weak as well, maxing out as it does at 100x the bet for a full 15+ scatter pay symbols in view. Scatter pays add something extra, and the game comes with a respectable max win, but still.

Apologies for sounding like a broken record, yet Wild Moon Saloon just didn't turn out to be as wild as it proclaimed to be. What Hurricane Games and Stakelogic have put together should get the right player yee-hawing, but it doesn't come close to snatching the crown away from the heavyweights in its category.