Wild Hogs

Wild Hogs: Slot Overview

Rev your engines, folks, we're riding motorcycles though, err, the underworld? With a bunch of leather-wearing pigs in Stakelogic's online slot Wild Hogs. Sounds bizarre? Maybe so, but thematically, at least, Wild Hogs manages to work quite well. Mechanically, Wild Hogs' toolbox contains three wild modifiers, a free spins section, a Bonus Trail and a Super Bonus Trail, plus three feature buys. Let's see how well both elements of Wild Hogs gel together.

Wild Hogs' base game location is a puzzle. It's held like a dusty abandoned stone room, with booths on either side of the game grid holding burning… stuff. It's hard to think what those flaming objects might be; hazarding a guess would be pointless with how obscure they are. For those in the know, the meaning might be obvious, so please chip in with an answer if possible. For free spins, the game shifts to what could be a highway running through the bowels of the flaming abyss, or the game is presenting a vision of the future when global warming has reduced the planet to a flaming ball of ash and cinders. Somewhere hot either way.

Around the time of writing, it felt like Stakelogic's Superstake feature had dwindled in occurrence, and Wild Hogs doesn't offer it either. Therefore, bets range from 20 c to $/€100 per spin, and three feature buy options are available as well for those who prefer to cut straight to the chase: these are a spin of the Bonus Wheel for 100x the bet, the Bonus Trail for 150x the bet, or the Super Bonus Trail for 250x the bet. A highly volatile gambling machine, Wild Hogs' info screen mentions a default RTP of 96.01%, but as typically is the case with Stakelogic, lower versions are available as well.

Wild Hogs' sizable 6x6 gaming grid might look like it belongs to a cluster pays slot, but no, players instead get 46,656 ways to win instead. There are quite a lot of symbols here, too, 12 to be precise, made up of J-A card ranks, 4 different skull symbols, then 4 different hog symbols. A winning way of 6 royals is worth 0.2 to 0.3 times the bet, 6 identical skulls pay 0.8x the bet, while 6 matching hog symbols award 2 to 8 times the bet. Wild symbols appear on reels 2 to 6 and substitute for all regular pay symbols.

Wild Hogs: Slot Features

Wilds can also be lobbed onto the grid via three wild modifiers and are joined by other features such as Bonus Wheels, free spins, the Bonus Trail, and the Super Bonus Trail.

Wild Modifiers

Wild modifiers trigger at random, and when they do, one of these effects is executed. Like regular wilds, they never appear on the leftmost reel.

• Wild Hog General – creates up to 5 random multipliers from x2 to x5 in value.
• Wild Hog Lieutenant – rides over the reels, destroying random symbols, replacing them with up to x3 expanding wilds.
• Wild Hog Sergeant – throws land mines at the grid, swapping reels into fully expanded wilds.

Bonus Wheel & Super Bonus Wheel

Landing 3 scatter symbols on reels 2, 3, 4, and 5 triggers the Bonus Wheel, while landing 4 scatter symbols trigger the Super Bonus Wheel. The Bonus Wheel spins to award free spins, the Bonus Trail, or the Super Bonus Trail. The Super Wheel offers better chances of getting the Super Bonus Trail or free spins with higher values.

Free Spins

The possible random number of free spins winnable from the wheels is 6 to 15. Nothing new aside from a scene change officially occurs in free spins compared to the base game. Landing 3 or 4 scatters triggers the Bonus Wheel again.

Bonus Trail & Super Bonus Trail

The trail features take place in a completely different gaming arena. This one is made of a trail that players move around collecting multiplier values and which starts with 3 lives. On each round, a number is revealed, and the player's token moves that number of positions along the trail. Landing on a number adds this value to the overall bet multiplier win bank. Landing on the same position twice loses a life. When all lives are lost, the value of the multiplier bank is awarded. Landing on a mystery symbol triggers the Golden reel to spin, revealing one of these:

• Three Hearts – one life is returned. This result will not appear if all lives are active.
• Three Golden Hand Grenades – 3 positions on the trail have their value increased by x2 to x100. In the Super Bonus Trail, this value is added to three random positions at the start of each move.
• Three Golden Hogs – resets the trail and removes all marked-for-death positions.
• Three Treasure Chests – a multiplier value of x10 to x500 is paid instantly. In the Super Bonus Trail, this value is persistent, repeatedly awarded on each game round.

Wild Hogs: Slot Verdict

Some of the first thoughts that formed after test running Wild Hogs was, hmm, this is Dead Man's Trail, but with pigs, on motorbikes, in a hellish environment. Weird. Not bad weird, though, quite exciting, actually, what with all the leather, rock 'n roll, and burnt rubber on show. Of course, the two games' themes are completely different, one being pirates and all, the other about some out-of-control porcine characters. Wild Hogs has more in common with Reflex Gaming's Hell's Hogs from a visual perspective, though Stakelogic's was the more absorbing game, offering higher quality graphics and a deeper immersive experience.

Free spins did feel like they took away more from the game than they added, though. No one's saying no to a bunch of spins which cost nothing, but they don't really do anything special, and whatever RTP was squeezed into them might have been better off being squeezed into the Bonus Trail and/or Super Bonus Trail, instead. Have to say neither trail approaches the level of sophistication found in the Dead Man's Trail bonus game, nor the same level of winning potential. Where Relax Gaming's slot rips all the way up to 50,000x the bet, Wild Hogs makes do with a decent, but you might be expecting more, win cap of 5,000x the bet. The trails are not entirely straightforward; there are special bits available when landing on a mystery position, and persistent payouts when getting three treasure chests might be sweet.

So while Wild Hogs bears similarities with other games, it's its own beast and a potential brute force one at that. To put it another way, the Bonus Trail and Super Bonus Trail are like duelling with a blunt bludgeoning object, whereas Dead Man's Trail is armed with an exquisitely crafted rapier, so on the plus side, trail riders get something a bit different to try.