Casino game maker Pragmatic Play puts its safari hat on as it heads to the continent of Africa for an online slot going by the name of African Elephant. It's an honest, if somewhat plain, title describing both the setting and the main character with just two words. This somewhat plainness spills over to much of the rest of the game as well, which isn't the most red-hot display of creative innovation to pour from the Pragmatic Play office. Possibly effective, though, when the extras are stampeding through, though if you blink, you might miss the Slot Features section where we dissect the Wild Shape and a batch of triggered or bought free spins.
African Elephant has a very familiar look, so if you've played an African-situated slot, you'll probably have a very good idea of what to expect from this one, too. Long dry grasslands, wild animals, hills, a winding river, acacia trees shielding the savannah-like huge umbrellas – the works. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and players partial to some African grassland-themed gaming shouldn't have trouble getting down with African Elephant's appearance. The same goes for the audio, too, though it's less rhythmically intense than these types of games often are; quite chilled really, but the tunes aren't a bad accompaniment to the graphical side of the game.
African Elephant is available on any device, from tablets, mobiles to desktops and accepts wagers of 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin. With a 4.5 out of 5 rating, it's a highly volatile slot creating a maximum return to player value of 96.04%, and there was no mention of whether this figure changes when buying free spins or not, so presumably, it stays the same. The action occurs on a 5-reel, 4-row game grid, with 20 unchangeable paylines for attempting to land pay symbols across.
Pay symbols include J-A card ranks as the lower value symbols, then animals such as a meerkat, leopard, wildebeest, zebra, and rhino are used as the high pays. Hitting a five-of-a-kind winning line all the way across the grid pays 4 times the bet for the low pays, and 5 to 30 times the bet for the highs. Where elephants come charging into the fray is on the wild symbol and the Bonus symbol. Wilds may be present on all five reels, substituting for all symbols except the Bonus – though they only appear on the board via the Wild Shape feature. Should a wild line hit, a five-symbol version of one is worth 75x the bet.
African Elephant goes in for the modifier free spins duo of features, where the modifier in question is called the Wild Shape, and free spins, well, they're just called free spins.
On each spin, a chance exists that a shape appears on the screen at the end of a spin, framing random positions. When the feature triggers like this, all symbols inside the marked shape are transformed into wild symbols. After the wild transformation has occurred, win evaluations may take place.
Hitting 3, 4, or 5 Bonus symbols either in the base game or the bonus round itself awards 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. During the free spins bonus round, a Wild Shape is guaranteed to trigger on every single spin.
If it's getting all a bit hot out there in the wild, players impatient for free spins to trigger have the option of buying them for the cost of 100x the bet. When buying free spins, 3, 4, or 5 Bonus symbols will land to activate the feature.
If getting back to nature is meant to be an exercise in simplicity, Pragmatic Play has achieved that. African Elephant is a simple game built around a fairly unsophisticated modifier that can be found in the base game from time to time or on every single free spin. It's an okay feature; there's certainly nothing wrong with cramming wild symbols onto a reel set in the hopes of linking them with a few matching pay symbols. There's not much more than that, though, so if a lonely added wild feature doesn't get your juices flowing, you might as well pack up and give African Elephant a miss since that's about all it's got going from a gaming standpoint.
As a piece of technical wizardry, the Wild Shape isn't a bad one; pretty basic, though, so it's questionable how long the novelty will last before wearing thin. The Wild Shape pops up in both phases of play, so that's something, but it did feel a little bare all on its lonesome. One potential saving grace is, quite literally, African Elephant's winning potential. The Wild Shape might not seem all that potent, but apparently, with a win cap of 15,000x the bet set in place, it would appear that African Elephant is capable of drumming up some pretty sizable wins.
For what it is, African Elephant is an okay entry in the African slot genre. It's a game that sticks to doing more or less one thing about as well as it can. If the Wild Shape seems like a pretty nifty device, then African Elephant should be all good for a bit. Otherwise, its sparse, almost clone-like feel may struggle to impress.
Play for real money
