On the surface, Piggy Payout is a nice simple game that you’ll be able to play for a few minutes and then discard. Look a bit deeper, however, and you’ll realise that there’s a couple of interesting aspects to it that will pique your interest. Read our in-depth review to find out what we’re talking about.
Special Features
There are a few decent special features that come into play during Piggy Payout, so have a look here to find out what they are and how they work:
Windmill Wilds
Wilds aren’t a new concept in the world of slot games, but they don’t all use them in the same way. Some will substitute in for any symbol, others won’t. Some have to be found on specific reels, others can come into play wherever they land. When it comes to the Windmill Wilds in Piggy Payout they take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. They can’t substitute in for Pigs or Sheep, for the reasons we’ll come on to explain in a minute, but they can sub in for any other symbol on any active line. You’ll also find that wins achieved with a Windmill Wild in the line are doubled, which is nice.
Pig Free Spins
The phrase ‘to pig out’ normally refers to when someone gets a lot of food and eats it all in one sitting. When it comes to Piggy Payout, it means a similar thing but is more relevant to a slot game. If you hit three or more Pig Scatters on your active pay lines then you’ll be rewarded with a series of Free Spins, allowing you to ‘pig out’ on spinning reels. The amount of Free Spins you’ll get depends on the number of Pig Scatters you get, with three giving fifteen Free Spins, four resulting in twenty and twenty-five coming your way in return for five Pig Scatters. You can win Free Spins during the Free Spin game up to a maximum of fifteen times, with prizes doubled during the Free Spin period.
Sheep Prize Pick
If you’ve ever heard anything about a farmer’s life then you’ll likely have heard the phrase ‘the prize sheep’, referring to the best sheep that they own. When it comes to Piggy Payout, three or more Sheep Scatters landing on your active pay lines will trigger a game whereby you’ll get to pick a sheep from a line-up of the animals, with one pick for every Sheep Scatter you’ve got. There’ll be a prize associated with each Sheep that you pick and you can win up to one hundred times your total wager with each selection.
Gamble Bonus
The Gamble Bonus is a features that’s becoming more and more popular on certain slots. It becomes active at random times, offering users the chance to win either double their previous prize or nothing when it does so.
You’ll win by correctly guessing one of two possible outcomes and if you’re successful then the feature will keep going until one of three things happens: you guess so many times that your next win will see you pocket more than £32,000, you’ve guessed correctly five times; you’ve made an incorrect selection.
Gameplay & RTP
There’s something about the gameplay involved in Piggy Payout that is just a bit bland. It’s difficult to identify exactly what it is, given that the graphics aren’t exactly over-whelming and the ‘under-the-hood’ ability of the game means that it can cope with them easily enough. The reels spin so smoothly that you can identity each and every symbol as it makes its way around them, landing with a soft thud. If you get a winning line involving a Windmill Wild then you’ll see it spin around in celebration, with other symbols just flashing on and off to inform you that you’ve won something. The special features involved are fun enough, if a little perfunctory. Picking sheep to reveal money is mildly interesting, as are the Free Spins that come with landing enough Pig Scatters, but they’re both just ‘perfectly fine’ rather than the sort of games that will make you head back to this particular slot in order to play them again. In that sense there are definitely more intriguing slots out there that have special features that are genuinely interesting and exciting to play.
The theme of Piggy Payout is quite well done, though it also feels a little bit ‘paint by numbers’. You’ll find the reels in the middle of a farmer’s field, with his shed and some sheep at the top of the screen. The symbols that you can win from are made up of things you might expect to see at a farm, including crops such as Sweetcorn, Sunflowers, a Chicken, a Cow and a Dog. Even the J, Q and K symbols keep up with the theme, seemingly made out of stained wood. Wood also features as the background for the ‘Spin’ button, plus the information on your Bet and your Win at the top of the screen. Yet there’s just something about the game that makes it feel far too bland to get all that invested in it. It seems almost corporate, as though there should be a big farming organisation involved in sponsoring it or something. To all intents and purposes this game feels a lot like what it almost certainly is – the skin of another game that they’ve taken and dressed up in farmer’s clothing. It would be extremely unfair to call it boring, but it’s not exciting enough to capture your attention for long if you’re not winning much.
When it comes to how much or how little you’re likely to win, the Return To Player average is 94.9%. That’s not enough to rescue the gameplay, which is far too unexciting for a less then thrilling RTP to help the matter. Yet it’s also not so low to mean that you shouldn’t even bother engaging with Piggy Payout as a possible game to play at some point. It’s 0.9% higher than the 94% average you’ll find with the majority of Virtue Fusion games, so that’s something at least. But when there are slots with significantly better gameplay out there that boast RTP averages of closer to 98%, you have to imagine that not many people will turn to Piggy Payout as their favourite game on the market. The problem is that the game doesn’t seem to know who it wants to attract to play it. It’s not likely to bring in the market that loves a massively higher Return To Player average, but neither is it going to appeal to those that like a really interesting gameplay or storyline to their slots. This isn’t even close to being bad, but it’s also not much more than perfectly ok.