Wild Swarm Review & Demo

Imagine the first man to discover how sweet and delicious honey is. And now imagine how hard this golden nectar is to come by. The first ones to loot honey most likely felt like hitting a jackpot, especially if they got away without a single sting! 

The idea of outsmarting a swarm of angry bees and walking (running?) away with your precious loot served as an inspiration for Push Gaming when they built the “Wild Swarm” video slot machine. The game’s cartoonish style may give you a wrong first impression: it is a slot machine with many special features and some really big wins in store for its players.

When you load Wild Swarm, you’ll be greeted by a welcome screen. Unlike other slot machines, this one doesn’t allow you to disable it directly. But a single click will take you to the game, so it’s not very annoying. The game itself has a relaxing, soothing forest backdrop with one obvious beehive hanging right from the top. As you might expect, this one will have a role later in the game, along with the meter in the top-right corner of the screen. 

Setting up your game

The game’s interface is simple, almost minimalistic, and awfully plain. From left to right, it has a Menu button, a Mute button, your balance, your total bet per spin, your latest win, Autoplay, and the big Spin button. Somehow, the developers didn’t find the space to put a “turbo mode” button on this user interface, which is a bit annoying – to switch between Normal and Turbo mode, you’ll have to go into the game’s Settings.

The game has 20 fixed bet lines, so there’s no adjusting that. You can adjust your total bet per spin, but even here, there’s a lack of flexibility: you can bet between 0.2 and 100 coins per spin, with just 11 steps between the two values. No fine-tuning your stake, I guess. 

Symbols

What the game lacks in its interface, it makes up for when it comes to the game itself. The game’s graphics are beautiful, it has a unique atmosphere, and characters you would expect to stumble upon in a Saturday morning cartoon. The game takes you into the forest, with the reels filled with symbols that fit perfectly into this backdrop.

Low-paying symbols:

• J, Q, K, and A – wooden minor symbols with maximum payouts of 2, 2.5, and 3 times, respectively, your stake
• Purple and White flowers pay up to 7 times your stake

High-paying symbols:

• Honeypot that pays up to 10 times your stake

• Queen Bee pays 15 times your stake for 5 of them on the same win line

• Honeycomb Dollar symbol, which pays out for at least two on a win line. This is the highest-paying normal symbol in the game, with up to 30x your stake paid out for 5 of them on a pay line. 

All these symbols are stacked, meaning that there is more than one of them on top of each other on each reel.

Wind symbols:

Wild Swarm has two Wild symbols:

• The Wild Honey symbol will appear in the base game. As usual, it has the power to substitute for any other symbol on a win line, forming winning combinations. It doesn’t pay out on its own.
• The Sticky Wild Bees symbol only appears during the game’s bonus free spins feature. As its name suggests, the symbol sticks in its place, forming winning combinations until the end of the spins.

Special symbols:

• • The Hive symbol is the game’s scatter – when three or more of these land on the screen, the game’s Free Spins bonus feature is triggered.
  • The Chest Symbol is a sight for sore eyes – but it appears rarely. When it lands on the screen, players will be presented with the Pick a Feature bonus hiding various wins.
• The game also has a Bee symbol that can be collected. Whenever a Bee lands on the screen, it goes straight to the Hive, leaving behind a Wild Honey symbol. 

Once you set your speed and stake, you can proceed to the game. Its format is a bit unusual, but this only makes it more fun to play. One thing that’s missing from the game is a bit more win lines. 20 win lines don’t feel enough for a game with a 5×4 format. You will often see stacked symbols not form winning combinations, which can be a bit annoying at times, especially when you think of the game’s volatility.

Wild Swarm Demo — Play For Free

Immerse yourself in the enchanting world of “Wild Swarm” with our free demo, an interactive taste of this exciting, nature-themed slot game. Get a feel for the gameplay and understand its unique features without spending a cent.

Wild Swarm is a medium-high-volatility game. This means that it won’t pay out very often, and the payouts won’t be very high either. 

According to Push Gaming, there’s no limit to how much you can win in this game. In practice, though, the highest actual win on the game was 3069 times the stake – which is still pretty high.

Note that the game has an RTP that can vary from one casino to another, between 94.67% (which is a bit low) and 97.03% (which is a bit above the industry average).

Wild Swarm Graphics

Push Gaming has a standard user interface that may seem plain and boring to many. Luckily, you don’t have to interact with it too much. At the same time, their games’ graphics more than makeup for their shortcomings. Wild Swarm has a relaxing forest backdrop, which is in contrast to the slightly menacing orchestral background music. Then again, we’re talking about a swarm of bees, so it’s understandable.

Wild Swarm Special Features

The Wild Swarm base game is nothing to write home about. But the game becomes truly interesting when it comes to special features. Aside from the bonus free spins feature, the game has two more:

Instant prizes

Whenever the Chest Symbol lands on the screen, you can already know that you won – the question is “What”. Among the prizes that will be revealed when this happens, you find instant multipliers of up to 125x applied to your stake, instant free spins, swarm boosts, and even the instant triggering of Swarm Mode

Swarm Mode

This is the special feature you have to work for. Whenever a Bee lands on the screen, it heads right into the hive, leaving behind a drop of Wild Honey. But each bee entering the hive brings it one step closer to a “critical mass”, a point at which all the bees come out to play. Collecting this many bees takes a lot of spins, considering that they don’t appear very often. 

But the Swarm Boost bonuses among the Instant Prizes triggered by the Chest Symbol can help. In the first stage, you need 10, in the second, 20, and so on, up to stage 5. But when the Swarm Mode is finally triggered, it is the surefire way to big wins: the bees land on the reels, turning into sticky wilds, and collecting you big wins as you spin.

Wild Swarm Mobile Option

Wild Swarm is a mobile-friendly game, maybe even mobile-first. There is only one thing that’s interesting about it: it doesn’t work in landscape mode. When you try to play it in landscape mode, it will urge you to set your phone back to portrait. 

The game’s mobile interface is simplistic, almost minimalistic. It has a big “Spin” button at the bottom, with everything else hidden under a hamburger menu on the right. On top, it only shows your total bet, your balance, and the time. As an extra setting, the game offers you “Left-hand mode” on mobile, making the menu easier to navigate for those using their phones with their left hand.

Wild Swarm Bonuses & Free Spins

Three or more instances of the Hive symbol will trigger the game’s bonus free spins feature. Depending on the number of scatter symbols, you’ll get between 7 and 15 free spins. What makes them special is the Sticky Wild Bees that land on the screen during them. Once landed, these remain in place until the end of the feature, ensuring even bigger wins with every spin.

But if you want to go for the bonus free spins, prepare for a long gaming session: it doesn’t come easily.

Should You Play Wild Swarm?

Wild Swarm is a medium-high volatility game. This means that it comes with the best (or worst?) of both worlds: it has a relatively low payout for most spins, and the wins don’t come very often. Still, considering all the visual elements crammed into the game, it doesn’t become boring in a short time – there’s always something happening on the screen to catch your eye. This makes Wild Swarm a perfect choice for those playing slot machines for entertainment, even played for free.

While it’s a lot of casual fun, the game is designed to cater to those with large bankrolls and a lot of patience. Its most lucrative feature is Swarm Mode, where a swarm of Sticky Wild Bees cover the screen – but you need to work for it. Collecting enough bees for the feature to be triggered is a long and tedious journey, which not many players have the patience to achieve. But once it starts swarming, you know it was worth the wait.