Wild West Buffalo Blast Slot Review

06/08/2024 | Categories: Fantasma Games Slots | Published by: Joe | Last updated: 06/08/2024

In May of this year, we became a media partner of Fantasma Games, a fledgling Swedish provider (Stockholm-based) that surprised us with many high-quality releases before we even teamed up with it. It got up and running in 2016 and has churned out fifty Internet spinners to date.

In all honesty, being someone’s media partner is not much more than getting their press releases, posting some of them, keeping an eye on what this developer is doing, and scanning any of its games that catch our eye. That was the case with Wild West Buffalo Blast, which appeared online in mid-June 2024. Looking at the regional standings, we see it is not doing particularly well anywhere. Fantasma Games’ creations rarely pull in impressive player numbers, but that is not a reflection of the quality the releases from this supplier boast. Here, we explore if Wild West Buffalo Blast is one of the better online slots from this company. Or is it one of its more underwhelming products? Read on to find out.

Theme & Design

Wild West Buffalo Blast could fall into several online gambling genres. The obvious one is buffalo slots, a highly popular category that Buffalo King Megaways currently dominates along with its counterpart – Buffalo King Untamed Megaways. For buffalo motif games, we also currently enjoy playing Buffalo Collector from Red Tiger. But, in our opinion, it can get better classified in a sub-genre featuring an animal Wild West theme. When we say this, we are referring to games like Pragmatic Play’s Wolf Gold or Greentube’s Mustang Dreaming. There are quite a few of these products around, and many have been doing quite well for years now.

We must say that audio-visually, Wild West Buffalo Blast reminds us most of Mustang Gold and the already mentioned Wolf Gold, both from Pragmatic Play. We must say that we like the warm presentation of this game. It has a typical Red Rock State Park backdrop, a nature preserve in Arizona famous for its stunning clay-colored scenery. You get a fairly standard western soundtrack here and some tumbleweeds moving behind the golden framed reels that feature impressive-looking symbol graphics whose style we love. They feature warm key lighting that gives the virtual creatures presented here a majestic appearance.

Concerning the button layout, you will find everything you need to enjoy sessions of gaming fun in Wild West Buffalo Blast on the right side of your screen, where the bet selector, the auto-spin, spin, turbo-spin, and settings icons get organized in a vertical stack. In the top left corner, you have this slot’s logo, and at the bottom, you can see a black bar where you can spot your current wager size and your online casino balance, and you have a speaker icon that lets you mute this game, which did not work when we tried it out.

Specs & Gameplay

We seldom see 3×3 symbol setup reel-spinning games these days, especially non-fruit ones. So, that is refreshing. We should add that this layout expands to 5×3 in the bonus round.

Wild West Buffalo Blast has a surprisingly low RTP of 95.7%, 0.3% below the sector average, which is something that we did not expect from a medium variance spinner. Yet, the spec standards have started to shift in the past couple of years, so previous layout patterns are not what they used to be. We saw a listed hit frequency of 14.4 for Wild West Buffalo Blast, which is shockingly low. Thus, we do not know what is up with that. There are only five paylines in this online slot with default bet sizes that move from a game low of $0.10 to a high of $100 per spin. But we have seen a range of $0.25 to $200 on some platforms. The max win here is a more than satisfactory 10,000 your stake, and the odds of you entering this title’s main bonus round are one in seventy-three, which is pretty good.

On the topic of symbols, you get two-low pay animals, a fox, and a wolf, producing wins of x2 for five-of-a-kind combos and three premiums that yield wins of x6, x8, and x10 when three matching ones hit on a payline. These are an eagle (x6), a bear (x8), and a buffalo (x10).

There are gold and blue coin buffalo scatters in this Fantasma Games creation. We shall get into these more in the subheading that follows.

Bonus Features

In the Wild West Buffalo Blast slot, the blue scatter can trigger the Jackpot Wheel. That awards five spins even during an active bonus round. The Hold & Respin feature, which is a major focus of the marketing of this game, activates when you land gold coins on each of the three reels. They do not have to be on a payline. When that happens, the grid expands to a 5×3 configuration where the gold coins become fixed, and throughout this feature, gold coins stay in their positions until their conclusion. Only coins can appear in the final win of the Hold & Respin mode, which begins with three respins, a figure that resets with each hit coin. During this round, the noted blue buffalo coin will grant you a spin on the Jackpot Wheel that can supply Mini, Maxi, or Mega jackpots.

GOSU Verdict

Wild West Buffalo Blast has a few wonky specs. We are not going to argue about that. And it is reminiscent of some other titles with a similar hold-and-win coin mechanic going on. Nonetheless, that did not stop us from liking this interactive gaming option. The presentation is what most won us over, and we thought the max win here was pretty alluring. Add the fact that the relatively simple gaming fun here transpired quite smoothly, and we must say that we found this slot relaxing and easy to play. We know that the specs will turn some people off, and justifiably so, but we were able to look past these.