A Western Tail

Get ready for a canine reel brawl on the slot from Present Creative, powered by Microgaming’s Quickfire platform. A Western Tail is bringing a group of dogs from a Wild West town to a set of slot reels with wild substitutions, a pick-and-click bonus game and a free spins round with selectable wild royals that can lead to wins of up to 500 times your bet in a single spin.

Sot Details

A Western Tail is a video slot with five reels, four rows and 25 fixed pay lines. Wins are awarded for three to five matching symbols from left to right only. Your reel adventure through the canine Wild West starts at 0.25 credits and peaks at 5 credits per spin. Some operators might offer higher bet limits. The game has medium volatility with an RTP of 96.50%.

Enter Dog Town on a hot, dust-filled day and stroll along the main street with shophouses, saloons and gambling establishments where the furry friends are at home. Distant rock formations from the vast plains of the Wild West are pitched against the blue sky. A typical piano piece from the era is mixed with shooting sounds and dog barks to create a fitting audio for the action on the reels.

The pay symbols start at the low end with Wild West-style card royals from 10 through to A, awarding 1x to 2x your bet for a single five of a kind. They are followed by five canines – the gambler dog, the business dog, the upper society lady dog, the outlaw dog and the sheriff dog – as well as the slot logo. Hit five on a line to win 4x to 10x your stake.

A pair of crossed colts marked with the word itself is the wild symbol, substituting for all regular symbols. It is the top payer with 20x your bet when five land across the reels. A lucky horseshoe marked with ‘Free Spins’ is the scatter while a money bag acts as the bonus symbol.

A Western Tail Slot Features

Founded more than a decade ago, Present Creative is the latest developer to be added to the evergrowing list of providers hosting their games on the Quickfire platform. Microgaming has truly taken a back seat in the last few years and leaves the “hard work” to small, independent studios. Not an inherently poor strategy but the history so far shows that many of the games released on the platform do not have what it takes to become popular player favourites. Time to take a look if Present Creative will be different.

For their first addition to Quickfire, they have chosen a Wild West theme and exchanged people with dogs that appear as outlaws, sheriff or gambler. For the reel excitement, they added wild substitutions, a bonus game and free spins round. Nothing out of the ordinary but neither totally bad, maybe we as slot nerds are excepting too much from each new release.

The feature that is easier to trigger as it has lower win potential is the Cash Crab bonus game. Hitting money bag symbols anywhere on reels one, three and five on a spin will see the screen darken and giving you one pick from the three bags to reveal a coin win. The prizes range from 2x to 50x your total bet.

The main potential to score big wins lurks in the Free Spins feature. Landing three or more scatters anywhere on the reels in one spin will trigger 10 free spins which cannot be retriggered. Before the round starts, you can select one, two or three card royals for three, four and five scatters respectively to appear as wild symbols on the reels for the duration of the feature. Hitting a full screen of wild symbols will lead to the maximum win in a single spin, coming in at 500 times your bet.

Final Verdict

Looking at the drivel being released lately on the Quickfire platform, A Western Tail appears initially as one of the better games with some appeal and an interesting mechanic in the free spins feature. And then you calculate the win potential, only to realize that you will hardly have a chance to recover to your starting balance if it took a good chunk out of it up to the trigger. We ran tests over several hours and hovered much of it around the initial balance, which indicates a very low-variance profile. Might be a good option though to wager through a bonus.

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