Wild Hike

Relax Gaming takes Wild Hike to a night-time camp site in the woods, where a fire burns beside the trail. Starting the free spins moves the view up past the treetops to a sky full of stars. The creatures on the reels are animals of the forest.

The grid is 6 reels by 4 rows, paying in 4,096 ways. A win needs identical symbols on at least three neighbouring reels, counted from the left. Card royals from 10 to A are the cheapest payers, with six of a kind returning 1x the stake. Owls, deer, boar, bears and wolves pay better, from 1.8x up to 10x for six. A howling wolf acts as the wild and appears on the four middle reels, replacing the regular pay symbols.

The central mechanic is the Expanding Wild. A wild landing on reel 3 or 4 stretches to cover its whole reel and starts a respin. Each Expanding Wild carries a multiplier that rises by one on every consecutive respin. The wilds and any scatters stay locked in place while the respins last, and respins carry on for as long as a win keeps appearing. If two Expanding Wilds both carry multipliers, those values are multiplied together on a win. In the base game, the multipliers disappear once the respins end.

Free spins arrive with three or four scatters, giving 7 or 10 spins. Multipliers generated by Expanding Wilds are kept until the round ends, and are displayed above reels three and four whenever no Expanding Wild is visible. Each scatter that lands during the round adds a spin. A free spins round launched from a respin sequence takes the multipliers earned there with it.

Players can buy their way in with two options: standard free spins cost 75x the stake, and Wild Free Spins cost 150x. The wild version guarantees at least one win on double Expanding Wilds.

Wild Hike came out in February 2023. The RTP is 96.09% at the regular setting, and the volatility is high. Wins land on about 20.12% of spins, the stake range is 0.10 to 50, and the maximum win is 20,000x the stake.