Buckshot Wilds

Buckshot Wilds: Slot Overview

The Wild West collection of online slots is a well-established one possessing a myriad of options ranging from forgettable to frighteningly good. One studio that has made its name in this competitive sector of the market is grizzled veteran of gambling NetEnt, largely through hit releases Dead or Alive and Dead or Alive 2. These are two slots which refuse to take prisoners but can shower potential glory on participants when the bullets, or wilds or multipliers, are flowing just so. Therefore, when a new Western slot rolls out of NetEnt HQ and saunters into town all bow-legged looking for trouble, it's safe to say interest has been piqued.

Nestled in a dry, rocky part of the world is the small town setting that Buckshot Wilds calls home. The base game views the surrounding area from a sort of buzzard's eye view, to take in the oil painting-like quality which NetEnt has used to craft the scene. Barge your way into the free spins feature, and the scene moves into town at night, which looks tidy and well-ordered, rather than a heaving hotspot housing the sort of debauched delights that draw in the area's desperados to unwind after a long week of robbing stagecoaches or rustling cattle. There's a metaphor here for how Buckshot Wilds performs overall.

Buckshot Wilds uses an expandable gaming grid, which has starting dimensions of 5 reels, 4 rows, and 20 paylines but can shift to 8 rows high with 40 paylines in play. It's a medium-high volatile slot, where the default RTP comes in at 96.04%, with lower models being available as well. The minimum players can stake is 20 c per spin, risible to a maximum of $/€100. As for pay symbols, keep an eye out for Western fonted card royals, characters, and pistols, creating winning combinations when matching symbols land left to right from the leftmost reel.

Buckshot Wilds: Slot Features

The features available in Buckshot Wilds are wilds, expanding wilds, expanding reels, free spins, a bonus bet, and feature buys.

Wilds & Expanding Wilds

Wilds help connect winning combinations by substituting for any regular pay symbol. Wilds remain on the reels, shifting down 1 position on each spin before exiting off the bottom of the grid. When a wild lands over a trigger symbol, it activates a symbol shootout. Then, the vertical, horizontal, or diagonal adjacent symbols convert to wilds. These are removed for the next spin.

Expanding Reels

Reels may expand at random on any spin, increasing to 8-rows high. Any wild on the top four rows is cloned 4 positions downwards on its reel. At the conclusion of the spin, the reels return to their default height.

Free Spins

When landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols, players win 6, 10, or 15 free spins, respectively. In free spins, the grid stays at its full 8-row setting for the duration of the round. For the first spin, 1 to 3 wilds are present, and +1 new wild is guaranteed on each spin. Hitting a scatter symbol awards an extra free spin.

Bonus Bet & Feature Buy

Activating the Bonus Bet doubles the stake to get guaranteed wilds in the base game, as well as greater chances of getting Expanding Reels and free spins. Also, scatters can appear on the reels, granting extra free spins. Lastly, 100x the bet buys the regular free spins round, or 125x buys free spins with the Bonus Bet.

Buckshot Wilds: Slot Verdict

Have you seen those brave people at rodeos, sitting on a bull, waiting in the holding area, before the gate flips open and the beast starts bucking around like someone just branded its hide, doing its darndest to throw the rider to the ground then stamp or gore them with its horns? NetEnt's first release of 2024 felt like the opposite to that. The gate creaked open, and a timid creature poked its head out, tested the air before casually sauntering into the arena, all calm-like as the audience slow clapped.

Hey, NetEnt is a maker of casino games that cater to a wide variety of gambler tastes, after all, and Buckshot Wilds takes aim at a different preference than those who think Dead or Alive 2 is the be-all and end-all when it comes to Wild West gambling. No offence to anyone, just making an observation here, but Buckshot Wilds feels like it might have come from a mid-level studio rather than one that has blasted the Western genre wide open before. Looks-wise, It has a similar-ish appearance to Western Gold 2 or even Quickspin's Sticky Bandits, though in saying that, it kinda looks like a number of other Western slots, as well. What distinguished Buckshot Wilds, however, was not its familiar artwork and features but its ridiculously low max win of 859x max win (occurring 1 in 50 million spins, theoretically), which kneecaps a lot, if not all, of the excitement of seeing what some expanded reel wild line action might involve. Answer, not much.

Ay well, NetEnt had an up and down 2023, from the goods (The Wish Master Megaways and Lost Relics 2, for example) to the not-so-goods (101 Candies) and many in between. With the release of Buckshot Wilds, the studio hasn't exactly started 2024 off with a huge bang unless low-potential, low-thrill Westerns are a personal jam. Time will tell how the rest of the year pans out and whether NetEnt nestles deeper into a comfy grove or decides to flex its creative muscle and show the new upstarts a thing or two about slot design.