Amazon Wild might sound like it’s a new service offered by an online shopping company where you place an order an any old thing can turn up, but it’s actually a very impressive slot game that has more lines than you can shake a stick at. Here’s our full review for you to read.
Special Features
We’ll start off by looking at the numerous different special features involved in the game:
Inca Head Wilds
If you’ve ever played a slot game before then you’ll know how Wilds work – if they land on your reel they’ll replace any other symbol apart from Bonus Scatters and can complete a previously non-winning line to make it into a winning one. In the case of Amazon Wild, two Wild symbols, which look like a golden Inca head, landing on the same reel will actually expand to fill the entire reel with Wild symbols, thereby increasing the chance of other lines becoming winners.
Map Scatter Bonus Round
If you land three, four or five Map symbols on your lines then you’ll end triggering the Amazon Map Bonus Round. Scatter wins in and of themselves are multiplied by the total stake that you’ve selected for all lines. The Bonus Round, meanwhile, will see you presented with a map of the Amazon that is covered in various ruins. You’ll be asked to select some ruins, each of which will see you be rewarded with a different prize. The number of picks you get will depend on how many Scatter symbols you landed, with three, four or five symbols resulting in the corresponding number of picks on the map of the Amazon. Pick wisely and see your potential prize go up in value.
Gameplay & RTP
From the moment you load up the Amazon Wild slot game you’ll feel transported, thanks in no small part to the forest noises that will be heard through your speakers. The reels themselves stand in front of a forest area, complete with fascinating wild birds such as toucans and parrots. Around the edge of the playing area is a border made up of golden Amazonian symbols, including the section that tells you how many lines you’ve selected and the size of the stake that you’re playing. The symbols are made up of numerous things that you’d expect to find in an Amazonian rainforest, including wild frogs, chameleons and miniature monkeys. There are also that many exotic looking flowers that you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally loaded up the National Geographic website. That feeling is compounded by the fact that the line numbers are located in boxes filled with colours that you’d expect to see on the plumage of the fancy birds located in the background of the game.
The consistency of Amazon Wild might, therefore, seem assured. Yet the bottom of the screen is taken up with buttons for the Paytable, Auto Play and Spin selections, as well as the buttons that determine the size of your bet. That’s fine, all games have those exact same buttons. The problem is that they’re located on a silver slab that looks like it’s the control board of a space ship, rather than something to do with an Amazonian adventure. Given the rest of the game looks so consistent, would it have been so difficult to make that section of the game out of the same graphics as the rest of it? It looks incongruous and almost suggests the designers were rushed when it came to the end of the their work. That aside, the rest of the game works quite nicely, with the reels spinning nice and smoothly and landing without any fuss or trouble. If you get a winning line then the symbols come alive, with the monkey eating food odd a leaf, for example, and the chameleon changing its appearance.
The various special features also fit in with the overall appearance and theming of the game, including the Wild symbols. The Map Bonus Round is a fun little sideshow, giving you a chance of winning some decent money without having to get overly stressed about the choices that you make. All of that points to a game that is fun to play, even if it doesn’t take all that much effort to get your head around how the rules work and so on. One-hundred lines are plenty enough to make you feel as though you’ve got a chance of winning every time you press ‘Spin’, which is a fact that is perhaps let down by the Return To Player average of 94.5%. Certainly that’s decent enough, with plenty of games coming in at 94% or lower. Yet an RTP of closer to 98% is preferable for a game that doesn’t have a jackpot to woo in players. How much money you see coming back to you is especially relevant when you consider that the game always plays with one-hundred lines, meaning that the minimum stake you’ll be able to play on it is £1.