About Rudolf Gone Wild
When all of your favourite gaming firms start blasting out their holiday songs, you know Christmas is just around the horizon. This year, Play n Go’s Holiday Spirits and Quickspin’s Big Bad Wolf Christmas Edition are already looking like big hits, and NextGen is right behind them with Rudolph Gone Wild, a red-nosed adventure.
This is a five-reel, 50-payline video slot that is always active. It has a bright, cheerful aspect to it, with reds and greens, yet Rudolf appears somewhat agitated — perhaps he’s noticed the meagre 95 percent RTP?! Whatever the case may be, he has Santa and his Elves to cheer him up, and they are definitely a happier lot here. Let’s hope they can assist with some solid victories.
Starting from the leftmost reel, you’ll need to land three or more matching icons on a payline to win. You can start spinning for as little as $0.10 per spin.
RTP, Variance and Top Payout
NextGen, like their competitors, has set the variance in their Xmas game to a middle of the road medium, perhaps in the hopes of appealing to a wider audience, with a fairly even distribution of wins that will keep casual slots players happy while the top 5,000x prize will appeal to high variance fans. To get there, you’ll need to take advantage of the numerous wilds and free spins on offer – more on that in a moment. The only criticism we have of this game is its lower-than-average RTP of 95.33 percent. Hopefully, this isn’t a pattern that will continue in 2022.
Paytable and Symbols
The good news is that NextGen has been liberal with symbol values, and premiums have a reasonably large payoff.
Playing cards from 9 to Ace represent low-value symbols on the reels, with rewards ranging from 2x to 4x for five of a kind. The premium emblems, which include a Gingerbread House, Christmas Tree, and the Gingerbread Man, are all well-drawn. These three will increase your stake from 6x to 8x for the maximum combination. Two elves are for 10x each, a Santa Clause figure is worth 12x your wager, and The Sleigh is worth 50x for five of a type.
The Wilds, on the other hand, are the major attraction of this slot. The regular Wilds and the Rudolf Wilds are the two types. They may be substituted for any other symbol to form a win line, and they can also trigger a 50x win if five occur on a line.
Keep a look out for the scatters, which appear on the reels at regular intervals and include Santa’s hearty ‘Ho’. For the free spins fun, you’ll need three. I’ll get to it in a minute.
Features and Gameplay
This game is a fantasy place for enthusiasts of wilds in slots, as the title suggests. They seem to pop up in every film, even the fantastic Snow Machine! The following is how it all works:
Snow Machine Wilds Feature
You’ll hear it before you see it: the snow machine’s screech heralds a splatter of white powder over the reels, transforming 1 to 4 symbols into wilds and triggering winnings.
Featured in Flying Wilds
The Elves can add more random wilds, so be nice to them when they come marching onto the reels to convert symbols at random once again.
Rudolph Wilds is a character in the film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein
This is a characteristic of the wandering wilds. Re-spins are triggered any time a Rudolph Wild appears on the reels. All Rudolph Wild symbols on the reels will travel one step to the left with each re-spin. This will continue until no more Rudolph Wilds appear on the reels.
Feature of Free Spins
You’ll get the Free Spins bonus with Rudolf Wild stacks if you land three Scatters on the three middle reels at the same time.
Before it starts, you must choose from nine boxes on the screen to see out how many spins you’ll have and how high the Rudolf Wilds piles will be. You can earn 6, 8, 10, 12, 16, or even 20 free spins depending on how you choose. Rudolph Wild stacks can be three, four, six, or eight symbols tall.
During free spins, the Rudolph Wild re-spins feature will be activated, and if you land a Rudolph Wild on the reels, the free spins will be halted and re-spins will be executed until no more Rudolph Wilds appear on the reels.
Conclusion
Rudolf Gone Wild is a fun little Christmas slot that should appeal to the majority of gamers this holiday season. The high value of the premium symbols, along with the huge number of paylines (50), implies that very frequent wins are in the cards. The wilds, on the other hand, are the true stars of the show — we adore the Snow Machine feature, which looks and sounds great, and the Wild Stacks and Re-Spins / Free Spins are undoubtedly the key to even approaching the 5,000x top prize. In a nutshell, one of the best Christmas 2020 releases.
