Wild Coaster Slot (PG Soft) Slot Demo & Review

Rollercoasters make an excellent analogy for high variance slots, in my opinion; you have the incredible highs of an enormous win one moment, the disappointment of your bankroll running low the next, and of course, the best bit – an amazing rush when the game picks you back up with a lifesaving hit, returning you to those earlier highs. It’s strange, then, that there doesn’t seem to have been many rollercoaster-themed games released over the years! Novomatic did make one many years ago titled Roller Coaster, but I haven’t seen that available anywhere for some time now. NetEnt has also created one, according to Google, although there seems to be some confusion as to whether it is, in fact, just Novomatic’s game that has been accidentally mislabelled.

The Wild and Scatter Symbols head the paytable, but sadly, neither has any cash premium attached to it! The first of the symbols with a payout is a Rollercoaster Car, which will pay you 4x the total stake for a complete payway of six of a kind. A Ferris Wheel occupies the second-place spot with a return of 3.5x for all six symbols, whilst the Circus Tent will add 3x your bet back to your balance whenever a full payway happens to form. The final high-paying symbol is a Ticket Machine, with a return of 1.5x for a six-of-a-kind combination. Next, there are two medium pays, represented by a Hot Dog and a Trashcan – nice pairing there, PG Soft! – and both of these have a return of 0.75x the current stake. Finally, the low pays are divided into two categories, with the Ace and King offering 0.5x and the lowly Queen, Jack, and Ten all paying 0.2x for all six symbols.

PG Soft has a neat bet selection system which uses four individual dropdowns to let you select a bet size, bet level, base bet, or total bet. This gives a significant amount of flexibility, allowing you to choose any multiple of the minimum €0.20 bet up to the maximum of €100.00 per round.

Fans of Megaways games shouldn’t have any trouble getting used to the base game setup of Wild Coaster. There are six main reels, each of which can divide into between two and four segments on each spin, along with two additional horizontal rows that add two additional positions to reels two through five. This results in a minimum of 4,096 or a maximum of 20,736 payways per spin.

Ascending Multiplier

At the start of each base game spin, the current round multiplier will be reset to 1x. After winning combinations have been evaluated during each spin, the current round multiplier will be increased by 1x before the winning symbols are removed from the playfield.

After the playfield is refilled with new symbols, any newly formed winning combinations will have the increased round multiplier applied to them. This process will repeat until no more winning combinations are visible on the reel set.

Wild Symbol Life Counter

Wild symbols that land on the top and bottom horizontal rows have three ‘lives’ attached to them initially. Whenever a wild forms part of a winning combination, a life will be deducted from the counter. When no lives remain, the wild symbol will explode as part of the next symbol removal phase.

Expanding Wild Symbol

If a wild symbol appears above and below a reel simultaneously, all symbols in that column will be transformed into wild symbols. These newly created wild symbols have the same number of lives as the wilds which made them – see the life counter paragraph above for details.

The main bonus round is a free spin feature triggered by hitting at least four scatter symbols anywhere on the reel set. So, a four-scatter trigger will award ten free spins, with each additional scatter adding another two spins to your starting total.

Free Spins

At the start of the bonus round, the current round multiplier is reset to 1x. However, the round multiplier does not reset between free spins, so it will continue to increment until the conclusion of the feature.

In this mode, any wild symbols that land on the reels will remain in place until the end of the feature or until they are used in a winning combination – whichever comes first. The free spins feature can also be re-triggered by hitting four more scatters whilst the bonus is active.