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Let’s talk about Cheetah Wild. On paper, it’s a big 5×4 slot with 1024 ways to win, but in reality, the whole game relies on one incredibly fragile mechanic that will probably drive you crazy.
Here’s the deal: you’ve got money symbols (worth anywhere from 0.25x to 100x) landing on reels two through five. But to actually collect that money, you need a golden paw symbol to land on reel one. Sounds simple enough, right?
Here is the catch, the paw only collects the cash if the symbols form a perfect, unbroken chain from left to right. If a regular symbol drops on reel two, your chain is dead instantly. You can land the golden paw, a 3x wild, and a huge stack of cash on the last reel, and you won’t win a dime because they aren’t touching. The game technically hits a lot (about 31% of the time), but most of those are just penny payouts. In my first sitting, my best regular win was a pathetic 3.9x my bet.
The Free Spins: Too Slow to Get Good
If you manage to land three baobab tree scatters, which actually happens fairly often, about once every 89 spins, you trigger the free spins. Don’t get excited about the trigger itself, though: three scatters hand back the price of the spin and not a penny more.
Once you’re in, the game introduces a “Level Up” mechanic using a cheetah’s eye symbol. Every time an eye lands, it turns into cash and gets added to a meter. Collect enough of them, and the game starts upgrading the premium animal symbols (elephants, rhinos, zebras, and gazelles) into extra cash targets.
It’s a fun idea because it slowly clears the junk off the board. The problem? It takes forever. Unless you get lucky and land two scatters to trigger extra spins, the bonus round usually ends right when the board is finally starting to get good.
The Bonus Buys: Make It Make Sense
If you’re the type who likes to buy the bonus, things get genuinely weird here. You have two options:
- The 100x Buy: Gives you the standard bonus round.
- The 500x “Super” Buy: Gives you the bonus round but starts you off with up to 15 cheetah eyes already collected, meaning a bunch of the animals are already converted to cash.
Here is why this makes no sense: the cheaper 100x buy actually has a higher average return (96.57%) than the insanely expensive 500x buy (96.50%). You are literally paying five times the price for a worse return. When I tested this out, I did finish the night ahead, but the cheap 100x buy is what saved me. It kept retriggering and nearly tripled its spins. The 500x super buy got the minimum trigger, never retriggered once, and didn’t even pay for itself.
The Final Verdict
Cheetah Wild caps its max win at 5,000x your bet. You can pay extra for the 2.5x “ante bet” to drastically improve your odds of hitting that max win (from a 1-in-3.7 million longshot down to 1-in-232,450), but the cap itself doesn’t go up.
If this game feels familiar, it’s because Pragmatic Play already built this exact same round into Big Duck Splash 1000. But that game had a 25,000x max win! Why play Cheetah Wild for the exact same slow grind when the top prize is five times smaller? Plus, online casinos can lower the payout percentages on this game, so you might be playing a version that pays out even less than advertised.
Between the frustrating “unbroken chain” base game, the overpriced bonus buy, and the lower max win, the math here just doesn’t justify your money. Skip the super buy, or better yet, skip the game entirely.
