Shocking Wild Slots
For players looking for an electrifying slot experience, Stakelogic have come up with the answer courtesy of Shocking Wild – a 5 reel, 10 payline title that features alternating wilds to jolt your wins.
Including bold colourful graphics and a soundtrack taken straight from the John Carpenter-school of synth-music, the game has a pick-up-and-play appeal that makes it ideal for newcomers to the world of online video slots. Available from just €0.10 per spin, Shocking Wild offers a regular jackpot of 500x your bet, resulting in a theoretical top award of 50,000 coins if you catch lightning in a bottle.
Shockingly Simple
As mentioned above, Shocking Wild is an incredibly easy game to get to grips with given players only need to worry about how much they are wagering each turn. The game’s 10 paylines are fixed at all times, meaning users instead have to choose the coin value and coin amount that they wish to bet.
Accessible via a handy pop-up menu that is launched from the main Shocking Wild console, players will be able to choose a coin value from €0.01 to €0.50 and a coin amount of 1-10 coins per line. These two numbers are then multiplied together to give you your total bet, with the vast number of combinations meaning that the slot is playable from as little as €0.10 or as much as €50 every spin.
Whatever level of investment they choose to make, players will be chasing a maximum regular jackpot of 500x their bet per line for matching five diamond icons on a valid payline, while there are smaller prizes starting at 5x your line bet for any three-of-a-kind combination. Random wilds also help boost your winnings, with the perfect configuration potentially awarding up to 50,000 coins.
Let There Be Light
In terms of visuals, Shocking Wild is again strikingly simple. The game features a full cast of unique symbols on its reels – all of which are varieties of gem – while the background is a fairly abstract design that could either be the night sky or the inside of precious stone depending on interpretation.
The symbols themselves feature a range of colours including pink, blue, green, red, yellow, turquoise, purple, amber and white in ascending order of value, with each symbol representing a different type of gem stone. As the title would suggest, electricity also plays a large role in the game’s look and feel, with all winning payline combinations being lit up by a bright bolt of lightning.
In terms of music, the Shocking Wild features a synth-driven soundtrack that plays continually throughout the game. Though a nice piece of music for the first few spins, this does, however, get a bit repetitive after awhile and players will probably find themselves muting the audio before long.
Power Outage
In terms of the bonus features in Shocking Wild, there is only truly one aspect that makes the game unique – and honestly we think it’s a bit of a cop-out. The game proudly advertises its “alternating wilds” as if they were an undisputed highlight, but honestly they add little to the overall gameplay.
At the start of each spin, any one of the nine regular symbols will become wild, with this icon also appearing in the background to remind you which gem stone is going to be “hot” for that turn. The wild continues to alternate with each and every spin, meaning a new symbol becomes more valuable each go, but the question remains: is this actually any different from having a fixed wild symbol?
In truth, the answer is “no, not really”. The beneficial effects of having a different wild icon each turn are fairly negligible and can even be a hindrance to players, as – for instance – if the diamond symbol becomes wild, they’ll have fewer potential wilds to hit as this icon doesn’t come around so often. Overall, this makes the feature a bit misleading and not really the major selling point it claims to be.
Lacking a Spark
While the all-round simplicity of Shocking Wild makes it a decent enough title for players who are new to the world of online video slots, it perhaps lacks the depth needed to keep more seasoned gamers entertained. The one bonus feature included in the game is fairly poor and the maximum 50,000 coin payout is nigh-on impossible to achieve, meaning there are better options out there.
