Wild Gladiators Slot Review

Wild Gladiators is a video slot from Pragmatic Play with 5 reels and 25 paylines. Released in March 2019, the slot can be played in online casinos such as Mr Green, LeoVegas or Rizk.

Theme and basic information

With Wild Gladiators we get yet another slot featuring ancient Rome and its gladiator arenas. The gladiator in this game, however, looks more like an officer of the Roman army than like a slave from foreign lands forced to fight for his life. He’s all handsome and golden and clad in precious armour.

Compare him to the gladiators of Yggdrasil’s Champions of Rome slot and you’ll know what we mean. Alas, it is quite unfortunate for Pragmatic Play’s offering to be released on the heels of Yggdrasil’s game of the same theme as a comparison become inevitable. Wild Gladiators looks a lot simpler, albeit colourful, and a lot less sophisticated and well-drawn than Champions of Rome. It compares well to the looks of all other Pragmatic Play slots but loses terribly to Champions of Rome.

Be that as it may, it’s not an ugly game. You do get a handsome lady (never mind that she wields a knife) and even the emperor looks good. There’s a fierce tiger on the reels as well and a shield as well as a war chariot. The arena itself is the scatter and the low value symbols are the card symbols from 10 to A.

The emperor is worth the most with 16x our stake for a win of 5 on a payline. The woman pays out 10x our stake for such a win and the tiger 8x. The gladiator wild would also pay out 16x our stake for five on a payline.

You can play this game from 0.25 to 125.00.

The multiplier reel and the super wild feature

It’s hard to miss the 6th reel in this game, spinning along the other five on every spin. It holds multipliers from 1x to 10x, indicating which multiplier will be applied on any win once the reels stop. Often, you’ll only get the 1x to 3x, but every once in a while you get more than that and it can be pretty good.

Another symbol to look out for on the multiplier reel is the Super Wild Bonus, which only spins along there and can land on the middle position, thus triggering the feature. In that case, wilds will ‘rain’ down and one will land on every single reel. A multiplier will also be applied at the end of the spin. You can easily get wins of 5 of a kind here with a good multiplier on top.

Finally, in the base game, whenever the wild lands on reel 3, it will expand there to cover the whole reel. During the free spins there’s potential for that to happen on all five reels.

More expanding wilds in the free spins

You trigger the free spins when the scatter lands on reels 1, 3 and 5. That will give you 10 free spins and the option of expanding wilds on every reel on every spin. The multiplier reel stays in place and the maximum multiplier remains at 10x.

The good thing is that you can retrigger the free spins indefinitely as long as you keep getting those scatters on reels 1, 3 and 5, which gives you 10 spins each time. Ordinarily, you won’t play more than 10 or 20 spins at a time. Since we found the free spins to trigger reasonably frequently, this was not much of an issue.

Conclusion: Good mechanics in a volatile slot

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of Wild Gladiators is 96.17%, which is just average value. This is a volatile slot and wins are not as frequent as you would hope for. The Super Wild Bonus in the base game only shows up every once in a while, sometimes less often than the free spins. But they can yield fantastic wins, so they are worth the wait.

Beyond that, Wild Gladiators is a fairly simple slot. The mechanics are effective and sufficient. You don’t need more than that. If you manage to score a few wins, this game will make you happy, even if you won’t stay for the visuals. Eventually, you might want to head elsewhere for something more interesting and if gladiators are your thing, we would very much recommend Champions of Rome.