Wild Depths is an aquatic-based adventure from Pragmatic Play, providing an innocuous-looking setting for players to experience life beneath the seas. Well, a cartoon version of life beneath the seas, in the spirit of Finding Nemo, where there are little to no dangers from the local inhabitants. Visually, it also bears some similarities to Relax Gaming's Deep Descent, which failed to chart. On the gaming side, Wild Depths has been decked out in a few features which are relatively simple on their own but do have the ability to combine quite well. These are multiplier wilds, roaming wilds, respins, free spins, and a progressive win multiplier.
Once submerged, Wild Depths isn't majorly wild from a thematic standpoint. Or deep, really either, as the whole area is well lit by sunbeams filtering through the water to illuminate purple rocks, weeds, and a light sandy bottom. It's the sort of place where sharks would probably be vegetarians, and on each respin, a wide-eyed orange fish blows some sort of trumpet thing to move the reels. On the whole, Wild Depths is quirkily pleasant and a pretty easy place to just lay back and chill for a bit.
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If you are waiting for a 'however', then the math model isn't anywhere near as chilled as the undersea setting. Volatility is the main cause for this, rated 5 out 5, so it is clearly pretty high. The RTP is good at the default setting, coming in at 96.48%, while players can look forward to triggering the bonus game every 120 spins, theoretically. The whole deep-sea dive may be experienced on any device where stakes vary from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin.
Played on a 5-reel, 4-row game area, there are 40 paylines to land winning combinations of at least three of a kind across. The paytable keeps the bright, bubbly theme going by using chunky neon 10-A royals as the low pays, three shellfish as the mids, and three cheerful-looking fish as the premiums. Landing five symbol winning combinations are worth 1-1.5x for the lows, 2.5-5x for the mids, and 7.5-20x the bet for the premium symbols. Wilds are the key to landing larger catches in Wild Depth. They appear on all but the first reel and substitute for all symbols except the scatter. Wilds always carry a multiplier of x2, which is applied to all winning combinations they are a part of. If more than one wild is used in a win, the multiplier values multiply between each other.
Wild symbols also lead into a couple of other features, namely roaming wilds and respins, plus a progressive multiplier which becomes available when the free spins bonus round has been activated.
Whenever a wild symbol hits in the base game, it remains on the reels. On the next paid spin, it moves up one position on its reel until eventually leaving the screen. Changing bet while there are wilds in view removes them from the screen, so the next paid spin starts without the roaming wild.
The pearl in oyster symbol is the scatter which appears on all reels. Landing 3, 4, or 5 of them pays 2x, 15x, or 100x the total bet and triggers 6, 9, or 12 free spins. During free spins, whenever a wild symbol hits, it triggers the same roaming wild/respins sequence as covered above. In addition, every time a respin happens, a win multiplier increases by +1. This win multiplier applies to all respin wins, then resets at the end of the respin sequence when all wilds have moved off the grid. Scatters stay on the reels during the bonus round and landing 3 of them awards 5 additional free spins without limit.
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Wild Depths is one of those games that's so blinking nice it's hard not to like. You can see why companies like Pixar do so well, year in and year out. Create something this adorable, and someone somewhere is bound to fall for it. The colourful aquatic habitat and the jolly Caribbean soundtrack get you on their side almost immediately. What helps is Wild Depths backs up its amiability with a few decent features that function fine on their own and can amplify each other once the bonus round has been activated.
You probably won't have to wait super long for the bonus either, as the 1 in 120 spins on average is less daunting than it can be from Pragmatic Play - though, as a consequence, the average payout is likely lowered. Then the respin feature comes into its own with the addition of a win multiplier. It's too bad the multiplier doesn't carry over to regular free spins or persist for the next respin trigger. Still, Wild Depths is able to rustle up entertaining moments as it is. Wild multipliers multiplying each other, rather than adding their values, has the ability to mix well, but wilds did tend to land on single reels only in the review. Or, if more than one reel possessed wilds, it would be like reels 2 and 5, making them tough to link up. Basically, don't count on wild multipliers to combine too much.
In some ways, Wild Depths didn't feel hugely volatile due to the regularity of free spin triggers. However, bonus round payouts were on the small side, and dead spins abounded in the base game. Then again, maybe we just caught Wild Depths on a calm day. Winning potential is here technically speaking, and Pragmatic Play has put a 5,000x win cap in place to prevent too great a bounty from being pulled out of the sea.
If you like your games cute on the outside while possessing a bit of bite in the background, Wild Depths warrants a look. Everything has been well made, there are bags of jollity, and you never know if you've hooked a guppy or something more dangerous on the end of your line.
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