Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty  (Bigwinboard.com)

Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty: Slot Overview

In the year 2020, with Covid 19 spreading around the planet bringing life as we knew it to a standstill, software provider Pragmatic Play took a trip back in time to a simpler era on the frontier of the United States in the sticky wild slot Wild West Gold. A successful venture it was, too, enough to urge the studio to make a Megaways version a couple of years later. Now look at us; five years since the original was released, about to test run Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty. In a new move for the newly minted trilogy, payouts are triggered by a cluster pays mechanic, though wild multipliers remain, as does their sticky quality during free spins.

Where the previous two Wild West Gold slots took place in one of those wooden, middle-of-nowhere shanty towns on the frontier where tumbleweeds blow through a dusty main street, Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty moves play into the wilds, where a cactus and cartwheel adorn an even more isolated middle of nowhere spot where tumbleweeds blow through a dusty canyon. It goes without saying that Pragmatic Play has not used the Wild West Gold slots as an opportunity to shine a light on lesser-seen parts of the Wild West, preferring to use familiar audiovisual components to set gamblers at ease rather than devise original viewing matter to challenge their assumptions about the West.

So far, each Wild West Gold slot has been played on different set-up gaming areas, and in Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty, players get a 5x5 matrix, which makes wins via a cluster pays mechanic. Players may stake 20 c to $/€240 each time they hit the spin button, or, to make the game 5x more likely to trigger the feature, activate the ante bet, which doubles the stake. In both cases, the RTP is 96.48% at its largest possible return setting, while the math model is highly volatile.

The pay symbols have stayed pretty steady so far, and Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty lands J-A card ranks, pistols, bags of gold, and four character symbols on its reels. When 5 or more matching symbols are connected horizontally or vertically, they form a winning cluster, keeping in mind there is no cascade feature. Clusters containing 5-7 matching symbols pay 0.4 to 10 times the bet, while 13+ sized clusters are worth 2 to 75 times the bet.

Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty: Slot Features

What we've got here are wilds with multipliers, a free spins feature with sticky wilds, and a couple of bonus buys.

Wild with Multipliers

Wild symbols substitute all paying symbols, and they hit with a random multiplier of x2, x3, or x5. Multipliers apply to all winning combinations they are part of, and they add their multipliers to each other when more than one wild is part of the same win.

Free Spins

Hitting 3 or more scatters in the base game triggers 10 free spins. If the round is triggered by 3, 4, or 5 scatters, the possible multipliers on wild symbols are x2-x5, x2-x10, or x10-x25, respectively. When wild symbols land on a free spin, they become sticky until the end of the round. Free spins cannot be retriggered.

Feature Buy

Players may buy free spins triggered by 3, 4, or 5 scatters for 100x their bet or free spins triggered by 5 scatters for 500x their bet.

Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty: Slot Verdict

Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty has not only switched to cluster pays to calculate winning combinations, but it has also switched up some of the features. Not to outrageous levels, as the core of what you'll find here, wilds with multipliers and free spins with sticky wilds isn't enormously different to what was found in the previous Wild West Gold slots. But, we shouldn't expect too many changes to what has turned out to be a successful formula for the studio that has been ongoing, and it feels weird to say this, for five years and counting. Boy, doesn't time fly, like tumbleweeds in the wind; it just keeps on moving.

Cluster pays makes a good fit, but if you're busting to get into the bonus round to see how it goes with sticky wild multis, a dab of extra patience may be needed since the free spins frequency is something of a blue moon event. Once in, the experience is a little different in some ways, yet similar, too, as in monitoring sticky wilds, hoping more wilds land, and keeping an eye out for matching symbols that happen to land connected to them. Winning potential is interesting if you like numbers. Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty's 7,500x the bet cap lies between the original's 10,000x (which the studio must have updated since the review) and the disappointing (for Megaways) 5,000x of the second release. So less loot is on the line, but as a compensator, the max win probability is vastly more preferable in Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty when compared to the 1 in 3 billion of the original slot, a figure that might make the Play'n GO bean counters envious.

Numbers aside, Wild West Gold Blazing Bounty successfully transitions to a different win evaluation system and is a fairly entertaining cluster pays option for some sticky wild multipliers in the Wild West laced gaming.