Viking Vanguard Slot Review
The Viking Vanguard slot title represents a departure from the cheery themes and bright colours found in so many slot games from WMS Gaming. The Chicago-based developer has set this title in a bleak Viking winter, against a forbidding background of stone castles and icy mountaintops. Although the colour palette uses a lot more muted pastels, the Viking Vanguard slot’s icon designs are still as detailed and intricate as players have come to expect from WMS, and big wins are celebrated by the usual noisy music and showers of coins and gems onscreen.
The game plays on six reels, not five, which is another feature that crops up in several WMS games. Each reel displays four windows, and there are 60 fixed paylines, so players must bet on them all for every spin. However, coins bet per line can be adjusted from 0.01 covering two lines, for a total bet per spin of 0.30, up to a maximum of 3.00 covering two paylines and a total of 90.00 per spin.
All Symbols Theme Related
Eschewing any Poker symbols, the Viking Vanguard slot uses Viking runes fashioned from twigs as the low-value symbols instead. Higher-value icons are Nordic coins, adorned with different animal and runic symbols. Then there are two live animals important in Viking mythology: a wolf and a raven; as well as a female Viking warrior and a male Viking warrior. The last is the most valuable symbol in base play.
All the symbols can stack, so they can arrive in columns covering two, three or all four slots, which increases the potential number of winning paylines.
Stacked Wilds a Permanent Plus
The Viking Vanguard slot’s Wild is a dragon’s eye, in the usual role of being able to stand in for any other symbols except the Scatter to facilitate more winning paylines. An attractive feature of this title, however, is the fact that a stacked reel of Wilds, filling all four windows, appears on one of the reels during every spin. This is useful enough in base play, but it really helps boost the prizes during free spins rounds.
World Tree Scatter Activates Bonus Rounds
The tree at the centre of the world, Yggdrasil of Norse mythology, is lit in broody reds as the Viking Vanguard Scatter bonus. Three or more anywhere on the reels triggers bonus rounds with a varying number of free spins, depending on the number of Scatters in the triggering spin. These can be as many as 100 free spins, along with a 15X multiplier of the total bet.
In addition, the reel filled with stacked Wilds during the triggering spin displays nothing but stacked Wilds for the duration of the free spins. But other reels can also transform into stacked Wilds at any point in the free spins, covering up to a maximum of five reels. When this happens, and stacked Wilds line up next to each other to create grids of 3X4 identical symbols or better, an impressive full dragon animation ensues, to celebrate the massive wins multiple stacks can trigger. The free spins bonus can also be retriggered during bonus rounds.