Wanted Usual Suspects

Northern Lights Gaming continues its Suspects series with Wanted Usual Suspects, moving the action from the city streets of earlier entries to a small frontier settlement. The look is bright and playful rather than grim, with a little greenery and standing water under the grid, and the pace is kept up by a steady flow of triggered extras. The game arrived on 17 September 2024.

The layout is 5x3 with 20 fixed paylines, paying from the leftmost reel. Bets range from 0.10 to 20. The default return to player is 96.05%, with lower variants at 94.03% and 92.01%. Volatility is medium to high, wins turn up on about a third of spins (34%), and the top prize is 10,000x the stake. Ten through ace pay 1x for five of a kind, while manacles, pistols, dynamite and gold bags pay between 2x and 10x. Five wilds on a line also return 10x. Wilds replace everything except the sheriff, coin and scatter symbols.

The Outlaw Wilds each reshape the grid when they land, exploding into extra wilds. The purple one converts the top and bottom cells of two random reels, green converts a whole random reel, orange converts two reels, and blue converts four to seven random positions.

Coin symbols appear in both modes and carry cash values from 1x to 100x the bet or one of four jackpots: 20x Mini, 50x Minor, 1,000x Minor and 5,000x Grand, with only one jackpot payable at a time. Each coin leaves a sticky frame at its position, and a coin landing inside a frame lifts that frame's multiplier by one, up to x5. The sheriff symbol adds coins to empty framed positions and then collects every coin on the board, applying frame multipliers. Frames vanish after collection in the base game but remain until the end of free spins. The sheriff can also call for backup, bringing extra sheriffs onto the reels.

Two scatters anywhere add a token to the Perk Bar, which is full at 50 tokens and then grants an additional pick at the start of free spins. Two scatters in the top three rows also start nudging respins, where reels holding scatters shift down one place while the rest respin, until a scatter reaches the bottom row or five are visible.

Three, four or five scatters trigger 10, 15 or 20 free spins. Before they begin, the player picks outlaws to reveal perks: a boost that unlocks the first bandit on the trail, two extra spins, three added frames, more wilds, more sheriffs, or an empty reveal that ends the picking. Every sheriff landing during the round lights a stage on the Bonus Trail, and the four bandits each give 5 more spins with multipliers of x2, x3, x5 and x10. After the round, a Getaway Spin may be awarded, guaranteeing a sheriff.

The buy menu sells free spins for 100x the stake and a super version with more frames, sheriffs and wins for 200x.