Wild Duel

Wild Duel: Slot Overview

Armenian bunch Peter & Sons are a creative lot that is as individualistic when using common as well as less obvious themes to dress up their games. One theme they've visited before is the Wild West (Sheriff Colt), well, them and most other online slots providers, to be sure. We could spend a few paragraphs debating what pulls developers back to this part of the world but let's be like a tumbleweed blowing in the wind and just go with it. In Wild Duel, Peter & Sons bring their unique graphical stylings to the West, filling it with a quirky Wild Duel feature, respins, sticky wilds, expanding wilds, multiplier wilds, and free spins.

As well as Peter & Sons' individual look, Wild Duel offers a unique perspective on the traditional frontier town often used in these games. Instead of being situated on a dusty thoroughfare outside a saloon, players get a birds-eye view of the street, where buildings lie to the north and south of an active game panel. It's laid out like this, not just to be different, but so characters can appear on the left and right of the screen to duel it out. Occasionally this leads to features. Greeting players as they land on the home screen, 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' soundtrack whistles away to set the mood, quite well too.

Played utilising a 5-reel, 3-row panel with 10 fixed ways to win on, it's billed as highly volatile, and there are no arguments from us about that assessment as the game dish out plenty of punishment. Rewards are there, too, as is a decent return to player value of 96.1%. Gunslingers can load up any device to take on Wild Duel, selecting stakes of 10 p/c to £/€50 per spin.

Wild Duel pays when three to five matching symbols land in adjacent reels, starting from the leftmost side. The miscellaneous symbols include low pay 10-A card ranks worth 2-4x the bet for five, as well as cacti, TNT, skulls, and bottles as the high pays worth 7-11x the bet. True to its name, Wild Duel packs in a load of wilds in various forms. Their core function is to substitute for any pay symbol, plus some have secondary duties covered below.

Wild Duel: Slot Features

There's a fair amount going on in Wild Duel, though nothing too taxing. Everything hinges on scatters and wild symbols, as you will see.

Wild Duel Feature

Landing 2 scatters anywhere on the reels triggers the Wild Duel feature, plus a respin is awarded. For the respin, 2 new 3-position reels appear on either side of the grid. The one on the left is called the Marshal Reel, the one on the right is the Outlaw Reel. During the respin, the Outlaw Reel randomly displays outlaws with multipliers of x1 to x10, or blank spaces. The Marshall Reel has blank spaces or characters, which each trigger random wilds, full reel expanding wilds or sticky wilds, respectively. Sticky wilds persist while respins are active.

If 2 characters land opposite each other on the same row, they duel. If the Marshall wins, the corresponding wild feature is awarded along with the applicable Outlaw multiplier. More than one duel can take place at the same time, and winning at least one duel triggers another respin. Respins continue, as long as Marshals win duels. When no more duels take place or Marshalls lose, the feature ends.

Wild Placement

On any non-winning base game spin when no duels are triggered, there is a chance the wild placement feature triggers. When active, 3 wilds are placed in random positions on the reels.

Free Spins

Landing 3 scatters in the main game triggers 10 free spins. In free spins, the Wild Duel feature is unlocked for the whole session. Winning duels awards respins – 1 duel in a spin awards +1 free spins, whilst 2-3 duels in a sin awards +2 free spins.

Wild Duel: Slot Verdict

Man, what? We must have caught Wild Duel on a bad day because it served up one of the driest test runs of recent times, and we aren't just talking about the dusty frontier setting. Dead spins ran like moonshine on payday, and features could tease. Let's give Wild Duel the benefit of the doubt since any slot can be hard going at times, yet this thing darn gone kicked our butts during testing. It might look like another P&S charmer, but it was not horsing around. Catch Wild Duel on a dark day, and it's like the stagecoach not only refused to politely let you rob it, but rolled over you, your horse, your dog, and anything else that happened to be lying around at the time for good measure.

After a while of wondering if the game had a bonus round or if we'd read the rules wrong, it finally rolled into town to make its presence known. To Wild Duel's credit, bonus rounds were eventful, there was plenty of duelling going on and an element of action. There is potential here too, of up to 10,000x the bet, when the right wilds hit, stick, or pull in enough multipliers while they're at it. The duel aspect is a little superfluous when you think about it as the applicable Wilds and multipliers could just as well have been added directly to the reels. However, that's just not Peter & Sons flamboyant style, and the approach they've taken with the Wild Duel feature does have an entertaining quality.

Pour it all together, and you've got a challenging game that lone rangers in the Western audience might be keen to take on. Wild Duel's set up and features have a vaguely Dead or Alive air about them, without the down and gritty feel, largely due to the cartoonish look Peter & Sons are famous for. Don't let your firearm leave your side though, like NetEnt's classics, Wild Duel isn't in the business of taking prisoners either.