Wild Toro Slot

Wild Toro is a 5 reel, 178 ways to win slot powered by ELK Studios. The base game is about the bull and the matador who is the rivals I guess. When I see this slot, it makes me laugh. I normally watch bull fail compilations videos on YouTube to see how people get owned by bulls during the bull run festival. LOL

Make no mistake that this bull in this slot does the same if the matador lands on reels 2, 3 or 4 and the bull on reel 5. Notice how this bull has smoke/dust coming outside of his nose. He is clearly upset. You do not want to mess with this Toro.

On the other hand, you can take your chair and relax, because you can wait on this bull to come for ages. You can have 200 spins and he still does not come. Even the base game can already make you so broke, because of all the empty spins. 178 ways does not make a difference at all.

You can trigger the feature by landing 3 matador scatter symbols on reels 2, 3 and 4 or by either landing the bull on reel 5. If you trigger the feature by landing matador scatter symbols you get about 4 re-spins. Every time the reels spin but reel 5 are looking for the bull to land on that specific reel in order for the bull to become a walking wild and move towards reel 2, 3 and 4 to bump the matador guy. Every reel he crossed becomes wild, so you had better hope you have a good symbol on reel 1.

With all that said, I do not like this game, because I cannot stand all the empty spins, never mind the low pay table. At first when this slot was released, I saw you get 1000 coins for 5 of kind roses which is the highest paying symbol, but then only to discover 100 coins is basically your bet. So 5 of kind pays x10 you total bet. On 178 ways it can sound nice, but make no mistake, you hardly see those roses on reel 1, on the brown and silver coins. So be aware of this slot, unless you have some crazy gambling budget that you do not care about.

Whenever I think of Elk Studios games, I think of its similarities with BetSoft games. Both have excellent graphics, very nice and even breath-taking to look at, but the general payouts from their games are simply mostly hopeless! Both these 2 game providers are most likely not willing to take any chances of high-roller players making huge amount of withdrawals. Well, 'no high risks, no huge gains', as the saying goes, and all players do want to get nice big wins occasionally, but by the trend of new games nowadays, they tend to be of the low to medium variance types. I haven't yet seen a new high variance game being released by any game provider.

'Wild Toro' is the Wild symbol in this game. It substitutes for other symbols except for the 'Toro' Wild and Scatter symbols. It is, however, a dumb symbol, for not paying anything for itself, for not doubling wins with it, and doesn't becoming stacked or expanded. 'Toro' the Bull, is the 'Walking Wild' symbol, ala the Walking Wild in the game Jack and the Beanstalk, but this Toro Wild only appears on reel 5. Each move it makes to the left is a free respin, allowing several chances of getting additional wins. If there are Matador symbols anywhere on the reels, this 'Toro' will attack them, creating Wild symbols behind it, for even greater winning chances. I really like this feature. At the right times, nice big wins can be attained.

The Matador is a non-paying Sticky Scatter symbol, acting merely as 'blockers' for Toro to attack. No Toro, no attacks, so no wins at all. These Matadors only appear on reels 2, 3 and 4, and getting 3 or more of them awards the 'Matador Respin Challenge', awarding one free respin for each Matador symbol, and each new appearing Matador adds one more free respin. If Toro appears on reel 5 during any the respins, Toro attacks the Matadors and the respin feature ends. Very interesting this, something new that I haven't seen before. It follows what the other 'Walking' and 'Shifting' Wild symbols would do, but this Toro Wild does both vertical and horizontal moves.

As for the other symbols in the game, the Rose pays 1000x, the Dagger pays 300x, the Fan pays 200x, and the rest pay from 80x to 50x, all per line bet for getting 5 of each kind. The paytable indicates a maximum possible win of 225,000 coins at maximum bet, but the overall paytable still remains a low one, simply because the Wild symbols can only substitute for the Rose symbols, which has a low win value, and there's only 178 paylines in the game. At normal bets, this would give decent good wins but not huge wins.

I don't like Elk Studios games for several reasons. They cannot be started with slow internet connections, or needing many reloadings before the game could be loaded up completely, plus long waiting times for the game to start. For this reason alone, I usually avoid playing Elk Studios games whenever my internet connection is slow. I do admire their beautiful graphics and animations though, but 'beauty is only skin-deep', as the saying goes, and 'money conquers all'. This Wild Toro game may be very nice to look at, very exciting and fun to play, but the payouts just aren't good enough. Those nice good wins are rare indeed, and Toro the Bull doesn't always appear on reel 5 either. After many unsuccessful plays, Wild Toro fades away like a plant in the desert. Too bad.

Wild Toro is themed around the traditional Spanish "sport" of bullfighting, and I have to say I think that whole thing is a despicable example of animal cruelty that has inexplicably managed to survive this far into the 21st century despite the obvious harm being caused to the animals, not to mention the lives of the matadors who risk their lives every day when they get into the ring with these enormous creatures.

ELK Studios haven't yet managed to come up with a single top tier slot machine, so I was really hoping that Wild Toro might be the one to put this small developer on the map at last.

The graphics and animations are definitely first rate, but the paytable doesn't look so great until you factor in the bonus modes that this game can award. There's a "walking wild" feature much like NetEnt's "Jack and the Beanstalk", but in this game only the wild on the fifth reel will trigger this bonus rather than any wild on any reel which means you'll definitely see it happen much less often compared to NetEnt's game.

The Matador symbols which appear on the centre-most three reels also act as a "blocker", meaning they have no value attached and attract no win of their own and so if you don't manage to catch Toro on the fifth reel any matador symbols that are visible will serve only to b lock other winning combinations, which is very frustrating.

Also, I don't understand how a slot with five reels and four rows can possibly have just 178 pay ways when there are obviously 4x4x4x4x4=1024 possible ways for adjacent symbols to line up in this slots configuration and the paytable and rules documents don't explain how this works either, which is very disappointing,

The sound effects are VERY irritating, particular the noise that plays each time you hit the spin button and I can't see many players bothering to play this game for extended periods of time before seeking out the "mute" button.

All things considered this is a pretty disappointing release, sure it is high variance and promises an attractive jackpot payout, but there's little to see here and I can imagine most players will have seen everything this game has to offer and be thoroughly bored with it in well under an hour. Keep trying ELK...