Cowboys & Aliens

This 9-paylines game from Playtech is based on a movie with the same name. This game plays with cartoon characters but the movie has real actors and actresses. Henry Ford starred as the hero, if I'm not mistaken, but I haven't seen the movie - not really interested to see because the movie wasn't a hit. Well, actually, neither is this game! Hahaha.

Cowboys & Aliens is the first fully comic-strip slot game by Playtech, not including those Marvel Super Heroes games of course, because they are all jackpot games, which Cowboys & Aliens isn't. Strangely enough, the game looks like a black and white game, with not much of colours being used anywhere, so the overall presentation isn't that nice at all. Not only that, the paylines are indeed very odd - only paylines 1, 2 and 3 are the usual straight horizontal lines, and the others have bent lines, so it needs some getting used to. This is the only Playtech game that has these sort of paylines!

The paytable shows promise of decent wins, with the Wild symbol paying a very nice 10,000x the line bet for getting 5 of them. The Scatter symbol isn't as good though, paying only 100x the total bet, and the other symbols paying from 1000x down to 75x the line bet for getting 5 of each kind. 3 or more Scatters trigger 8 free spins only, with no multipliers and no retriggers. Argh! That sucks! The only good thing about the free spins game is that it plays with random Wilds, ranging from 2x2 sizes, to bigger 3x3 sizes, and including horizontal and vertical Wilds too. 5-of-a-kind wins do happen on and off during these free spins and I've had a few of such good wins before, but unfortunately, nothing was bigger than 200x my total bet amount.

In the base game, an Alien Weapon Feature may randomly appear, shooting and transforming 1 up to 4 symbols into Wild symbols. Getting the Bonus symbols on reels 1 and 5 awards an Alien Attack Bonus game, whereby you pick either to play with Verity the lady, the Indian warrior, or Zeke the Cowboy. Verity has 20 whips, the Indian Warrior has 12 arrows and Zeke has 6 bullets. Any one of them can kill all the aliens during the Alien Attack, and each unused ammo pays extra cash. Killing all aliens also wins an extra cash reward. However, I have completed this bonus games a few times before, with all the 3 characters, but the final payouts from this Alien Attack Bonus game were rather disappointing! None exceeded 30x my bet amount. The best wins can only come from the Free Spins game, despite having only 8 free spins!

This game has a bug that hasn't been corrected even until now, from the first time I played the game until my most recent play. During almost every Free Spins game, the game would hang! I have to exit the casino and log in again to continue playing the free spins, which is very very annoying indeed! I wonder why Playtech has not done anything about this bug - it's been there since some years back!

“Cowboys & Aliens” is a nice slot game developed by “Playtech” with a comics’ design theme based on the Space Western-action film of the same name starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, and Olivia Wilde; an excellent film in my view.

This slot is provided with 5 x 3 reels and 9 pay lines that can be formed from left to right, from right to left and 3 of a kind middle symbols, all this due to its ANY Adjacent Pay feature.

Special features are 8 free spins triggered by 3 or more logo symbols and “Alien Attack Bonus” that can be activated when bonus symbol appears on both, reel 1 and 5, after which you will have to choose between 3 characters: Verity, Zeke and Indian warrior, each one with a weapon with different levels of accuracy and limited ammo number, needed for shooting to 3 aliens where you will need all your aim in order to collect the most amount of credits possible with an extra bonus if you get a perfect score.

On reel 1 it also happens another feature called “Alien Weapon” that shoots wild symbols on the reels randomly.

During free spins “comic strip wilds” occur during all our spins and these can be 2, 4 and even 6 squares in size, often leading us to get big wins that make this feature really worthwhile.

All the above features make this slot quite a fun game from my point of view; now, when this slot was just launched, many of my favorite casinos used the Playtech platform and I have good memories of when I played “Cowboys & Aliens” slot in order to meet my wagering requirements and clear my bonuses.

Today I can see that the popularity of this game has not really grown much since its release in 2013, even so, I think this is a very attractive slot, and especially I love the interactive approach of its bonus round and I can also see that financially this slot still works well for me.

In short, I think it is worth trying this video slot.

Cowboys and Aliens is a very entertaining slot from Playtech that shows its real value in the free spins round. This game features 3 different bonus rounds and I could not trigger the Alien Attack bonus which I think is interesting at least from a game point of view. After my game session I realized that his is a very low variance slot and it is kind of a difficult to hit a big win.

You need 3 or more scatters to trigger the free games which are with comic strips wilds. I got 8 free spins and I won only 17.60 the first time and nothing more the next time I triggered this feature.

Symbol on reel one and five triggers the alien attack bonus, but I guess I was not lucky to see the potential of this feature.
Symbol on the first reel triggers the alien weapon feature and from this feature I won 42 euros, but that was only one time thing. The gun shots and turns other symbols into wilds. Next time only one symbol was turned wild and I got only 2.70. Later did I find out that there is an arrow and numbers from one to four. When the arrow shows a given number the gun zaps and turns that number of symbols into wilds.

The graphics are a little plain on this 5 reels and 9 pay lines video slot game, but the sound effects are a nice addition to the slot. Some of the special symbols include aliens, a lady and a preacher. The Cowboys and Aliens logo is the wild and the spaceship is the scatter symbol. The reason why I like to play this slot is for the variety of features that it offers and the main reason is the 10 000 coin jackpot which I hope one day I will get if I manage to land five wilds.