Wild West Gold Megaways (Pragmatic Play) Slot Demo & Review

I genuinely couldn’t even begin to list all of the Wild West-based slots that I have reviewed in my time working for Demoslot! I was already a huge fan of NetEnt’s smash hit Dead or Alive machine long before I started writing reviews, and the sequel Dead or Alive 2 was even better. In such an environment, it takes a brave developer to challenge such a well-established and popular machine in an already overcrowded category! Unsurprisingly, Pragmatic Play chose to borrow some ideas from NetEnt’s game in their original release of the Wild West Gold slot, such as the sticky wilds, and have opted to do so again in the follow-up, but there’s enough new here to give Wild West Gold Megaways a distinctly different feel. Until NetEnt releases their much-anticipated Dead or Alive Megaways, I believe this machine is probably the best Wild West-themed Megaways game out there.

The numbers on the paytable might not provide a great first impression, but it’s important to remember that symbols appear in stacks, and their values can also be boosted by the multiplier wild symbols. Throw in the 117,649 payways, and the top payout of just 1x your bet for a six of a kind combination of the top character symbol makes a little more sense. There are three more outlaws in the high-paying category with returns of 0.75x, 0.6x, and 0.5x for all six symbols, along with two medium-paying symbols which share a payout of 0.4x for a complete payway. The low-paying royal symbols come in the shape of the Ace and King worth 0.3x and the Queen, Jack, and Ten, all with equal payouts of 0.25x for a winning combo of six.

The wager selection setup uses three settings to determine your overall bet, resulting in a minimum/maximum wager of €0.20 or €100.00, respectively. If you enable the bonus bet option, this will increase slightly to €0.25/€125.00 per spin.

The base game of Pragmatic’s Wild West Gold Megaways slot plays similarly to other Megaways slots, although there is no additional horizontal reel included this time around. Instead, all six of the main reels can divide into as many as seven rows on each spin, resulting in the same 117,649 maximum payway count that has become ubiquitous in recent times.

Multiplier Wild Symbols

Wild symbols appear on reels two, three, four, and five only and will substitute for all symbols except for the bonus scatter. Wild symbols have a random multiplier of either 2x, 3x, or 5x, and if more than one is included in a winning combination, then their values will be multiplied together before being applied to the current win.

Ante Bet

This is a bonus bet option that will double your chances of hitting the free spins bonus round. This comes at an additional cost of 25% on top of the normal price per spin. The base game RTP of 96.44% is reduced slightly to 96.41% when this option is enabled. This slight difference is unlikely to have any noticeable effect on your playtime whilst spinning this machine and is probably a hit worth taking for the benefit of playing twice as many bonus rounds.

Hitting a combination of three or more scatter symbols during the base game will award seven free spins. If your trigger combination includes more than three scatters, the game will award you an additional cash prize as well as the bonus round, up to a maximum of 500x the total bet.

Free Spins

In this mode, all wild symbols landing on the reels will become sticky for the remainder of the bonus round. Each wild will still be given a random multiplier of up to 5x when it first lands, which will also remain in effect until the end of the bonus round.

This is the first time I can recall seeing a Megaways slot with sticky wilds, and I was curious to see how such a feature could be implemented when the number of rows on each reel changes between spins! Pragmatic Play has made the wild symbol resize each time the reels spin—a straightforward yet workable solution.

Bonus Buy

The free spins feature is undoubtedly the most exciting part of this game, so it’s great to see that the developer has included a bonus buy facility which allows you to skip straight there. This feature costs 100x the normal price per spin, which seems very reasonable considering the huge potential of the bonus round.