Wild Times Slot Review

If you like living life on the edge, buckle up and prepare for wild times in Wild Times. Barcrest’s 3-reel slot provides multiple ways to win thanks to multipliers that will take modest wins and turn them into major payouts.

There’s a distinctly old school vibe about Wild Times; that’ll be thanks to the flurry of fruit symbols and the provision of 3 reels instead of the usual 5. Cherries, lemons and melons are the order of the day, with a few stars thrown in for good measure. Visually, there’s not a whole lot to look at, but for all its minimalism, Wild Times is a clean looking slot, with a shaded black and red background allowing the lustrous symbols to dominate proceedings.

The sound effects are as retro as the graphics, with 8-bit bleeps the order of the day, complemented by a series of clicks as the reels come to a rest. Barcrest are a company who are proud of their roots, and they haven’t strayed far from the fruit machines by which they made their name back in the day. Their slots might be digital instead of analogue nowadays, but otherwise not much else has changed.

Controls

There are just 5 paylines in Wild Times’ standard game, which doesn’t sound very wild at all, but for a 3-reel slot, that’s pretty much the norm. Despite the paucity of lines to play with, the stake per line can be cranked up high, all the way up to 100.00, resulting in a maximum stake of 500.00 per spin. The game also comes with Barcrest’s trademark big bet feature, which we’ll get to shortly.

The oversized controls for setting the stake per line lie to the left of the reels, with prominent green and red arrows performing the honours. For some reason, Barcrest have seen fit to specify two ‘i’ buttons; the one to the left of the reels opens a textbox with paytable information, while the ‘i’ to the right opens a more graphically rich pop-up with also contains paytable info. There’s no autospin, which leaves just two more buttons to the right of the reels: a green spin button and a purple button which activates the big bet feature.

Wheel Multiplier

In the standard game, the fruits aren’t worth much: 20 x your stake is all they’ll fetch for 3 in a row. The blue stars apply a 100x multiplier however and the red stars are worth 500x your stake. A lot of the time, your wins will be provided courtesy of the wild symbol which will appear on reels 2 or 3 and can substitute for any of the other symbols.

The feature game in Wild Times is the wheel multiplier. It kicks in any time you notch a win that includes a wild symbol. At this point, your win will be multiplied by one of the values on the wheel multiplier, which stand at 2x, 3x, 4x and 5x. Land two wilds on the same line and you’ll receive a super wild win, with your wilds multiplied by one another, granting you a multiplier win of up to 25x.

A 27-Way Win

Click on the purple symbol to activate the big bet game which will trigger 5 spins in a row. The value of any wins accrued during these spins will be totted up, resulting in a 27-way win. In other words, you’re no longer playing with 5 win lines: you’re playing with 27. As you increase the value of the bet, you’ll also increase the wild multipliers.

Big bet stakes can be set at 10, 15, 20 and 25 credits. With the stake at 10, the highest multiplier you can receive is 5x. With the stake set at 25, however, the maximum multiplier rises to 10x. Aside from the wild multiplier, there’s not much to this 3-reel game: just keep on spinning those reels till the wilds start to show up. That’s when the fun starts in earnest.

Go Wild

For purveyors of old school slots, Wild Times will do nicely. It’s a simple, clean looking game that does everything you could reasonably expect of it. It’s not the sort of game you could play for days, but for simple pleasures and instant gratification, it’s just the ticket.