Wild Cobra Slot Machine
Do you think you have what it takes to survive a face-to-face encounter with one of nature’s deadliest creatures? Find out in Wild Cobra, a 5 reel, 40 payline video slot from Merkur Gaming.
Featuring an animal theme that incorporates all beasts, great and small – including the majestic wild cobra itself – Wild Cobra is a simple enough game to get to grips with quickly, but offers players added incentives in the shape of expanding wilds and a free spins feature offering 12 bonus turns.
Snake charmer
As with the vast majority of Merkur Gaming titles, Wild Cobra is a fully-customisable slot that allows players to adjust both the total number of active paylines and their bet per line. Available to play from as little as $0.01 a spin ($0.40 with the maximum number of paylines enabled), it is a game that won’t break your bankroll but still offers plenty of scope for big wins thanks to its impressive jackpot.
Triggered by matching cobra wild symbols on each of the games 5 reels, this will award players a massive 1,250x their line bet – and this amount could be even bigger when you consider that wilds expand to fill the reels during free spins. While we’ll go into more detail on that bonus later, in the base game prizes are awarded for matching any three of a kind and pay at least 10x your line bet.
Of course, with all 40 paylines enabled, the lower value playing card combinations in Wild Cobra will not cover the cost of your spin, so players will be reliant on either matching multiple winning paylines at once or hitting a sequence of higher value icons in order to make actual profits each turn.
Animal magic
While the titular snake obviously gets top billing in Wild Cobra, the game’s 5 reels also feature a whole menagerie of creatures that are native to southern Asia. The game’s background looks something like a mangrove swamp shrouded in fog, with an earthy palette of oranges, greens and browns giving the slot a foreboding air of danger that is presumably reflective of the deadly cobra.
The animal symbols that comprise Wild Cobra’s set of unique icons include elephants, tigers, oxen, peacocks and Rhesus macaque, with the lower value icons being limited to the standard ace-through-nine playing card icons. In addition to the fearsome-looking cobra wild symbol, the game’s logo also features as a scatter symbol and there are animations present to mark winning paylines.
In terms of audio, the game features a fairly fitting piece of sitar music as its background theme, but the developers have missed a trick in terms of the range of sound effects used to herald wins. With so many animal symbols present, you’d think a collection of hisses, roars and shrieks would be the obvious way to go, but unfortunately only the standard slot machine bells and whistles are present.
Call of the wild
While there is only one feature of note in Wild Cobra, it is potentially a very rewarding one thanks to the presence of expanding wilds. Triggered whenever three or more of the slot’s logo scatter symbols appear anywhere on the gameboard, players will receive 12 free spins to boost their win.
During these free spins all cobra wilds become stacked symbols that are four-spaces high, but that’s not all – should any part of a cobra will appear on one of the reels, the cobra will slowly slither down the gameboard to occupy the entire column, creating multiple payline wins and huge prize combos.
When you consider that these wilds can appear on any of the game’s 5 reels, if you’re really lucky, you might find that the entire gameboard is filled by cobras, which obviously triggers the game’s top payout award. Further free spins can also be re-triggered during this feature, and all winnings can be gambled in a simple red or black picking game if you’re feeling particularly adventurous after a spin.
Once bitten...
Although a relatively simple game all round, Wild Cobra packs a serious bite in terms of its incredibly rewarding free spins feature. With the slithering wilds virtually guaranteeing multiple winning paylines, players can rack up some truly impressive payouts, which serves to elevate the game above and beyond the standard video slot fare despite its fairly basic visuals and lack of engaging sound.
