Quick question: what could possibly be more adorable than a loveable, furry, loyal lap dog? How about dressing poochie up with a ten-gallon hat and pretending it's a wittle cow boi? This is what developer Pragmatic Play has done with its beloved slot, The Dog House, transporting the canine crew far away from the sleepy suburbs to the Old West, tinkering with the sticky wild free spins feature in the process.
Titled The Dog House Dog or Alive, the dogs have taken to the Western environment like a charm too. The big brown one looks like it's the sheriff around these here parts, and it stands to the side of the gaming grid smoking on a big ol' cigar. The rest of the place is your typical frontier shanty town, wooden built, dusty, and looking like a gust of wind could blow tumbleweeds through at any moment. A sort of make-it-or-bust situation, which is a far cry from mowing lawns, weeding the garden, washing the car, and catching up on TV at the weekend urban setting of the original slot. Sometimes people want to kick back and relax, while at other times, 'A man must test his mettle, in a crooked ol' world' as Tom Waits sang. Or a woman, of course.
Bullet holes riddling the top wooden bar of the 5x3 game grid make it clear everything isn't as peaceful as a bunch of dogs in hats might make it out to be. Mechanically, The Dog House Dog or Alive is a highly volatile slot, after all, and it has a default RTP of 96.52%. The return value does get slightly higher when buying free spins, while the bet range is 20 c to $/€240 per paid spin. With its 20 paylines, The Dog House Dog or Alive pays for landing matching symbols from the leftmost side of its grid over adjacent reels.
Wooden made 10 to A card ranks sit at the lower end of the paytable, followed by a bone, a collar, and 4 canine character symbols. Hitting 5 matching royals gets you 1.25-2.5 times the bet; the rest of the pays are worth 5 to 37.5 times the bet for a 5-of-a-kind result.
The features are, for the most part, the same as the original The Dog House slot – wild multipliers and sticky wild multipliers in free spins, but a new retrigger element has worked its way in to add grunt to the bonus round.
Wild symbols substitute for all symbols except scatters, and they are present on reels 2, 3, and 4. Each time a wild symbol hits, it has a random multiplier of x2 or x3, which applies to all winning combinations the wild is part of. If more than one wild symbol is part of a win, the multipliers of all relevant wilds are added to each other.
Vault scatter symbols appear on reels 1, 3, and 5. Hitting 3 scatters triggers the free spins round and a payout of 5 times the bet. Before the bonus round starts, a free spins randomizer is played out to reveal the number of starting free spins. During free spins, all wilds that hit on reels 2, 3, or 4 remain on the grid for the duration of the round. Sticky wild multipliers have a random multiplier, which is revealed when the wild hits. When 3, 6, or 9 wild symbols hit, +3 free spins are granted, and the multiplier of all wilds on the screen doubles. Scatter symbols do not land in free spins.
Getting to the sticky wild free spins round can be achieved by paying 120x the bet to trigger it. When triggering the feature this way, the RTP is 96.54%.
The Dog House, believe it or not, was pushing 5 years old at the time of this review, and it's a game that proved popular enough to remain on Pragmatic Play's mind during the intervening years. Between The Dog House Dog or Alive and the original, a Megaways version poked its snout in, as did a 4-gaming grid Multihold edition, which made clever use of what can come across as a gimmicky trick. Pragmatic Play has largely kept the gimmicks under wraps for The Dog House Dog or Alive, as the features aren't tremendously different from the original.
After seeing the dogs move dramatically out of the burbs to the Wild West, the initial suspicion was that there would be more technical upgrades than what we actually got. It's not till free spins are in action that the new progressive feature comes into play. The new bits might not exactly be Pragmatic Play's wildest ideas, but getting extra free spins with double the wild multiplier values is a smart touch. It's one way of upping the potential thrills while also bumping up the win cap to 10,000x the bet.
Having a pack of charming dogs yipping about the place doesn't automatically mean The Dog House Dog or Alive is humankind's best friend, though. Wilds are under no obligation to appear in free spins, and they could be frustratingly shy during test runs. But, they might turn out to be the friendly pat-me type for other players, in which case The Dog House Dog or Alive is every bit as entertaining as the original, if not more so. Although, a lot has happened in the time since The Dog House dropped, so it'll be interesting to see if The Dog House Dog or Alive gets anywhere near as much love.
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