Mustang Money Slot – Free Demo

Ainsworth put a 2017 cabinet online and changed nothing

Mustang Money is the creation of Ainsworth. Wins pay from the leftmost reel rightwards along adjacent reels, and only the highest win on each line is counted. That studio needs no introduction to anyone who has strolled past a bank of land-based cabinets, and they're not novices. The bet is set per line, and the total bet is that figure multiplied by the number of lines in play. The game appeared on the online side in March 2017 with the cabinet DNA intact. Ainsworth had already brought Roaming Reels online in March 2016 and Cash Cave in February 2016, both of them cabinet conversions on the same 5-reel, 100-line frame. Upon discovering it's a conversion, the enthusiasm level of spotting a new Ainsworth slot falls considerably. Across my session the balance went from 5,000.00 down to 4,813.80. In fact, I can't work out why established, and respected game developers insist on porting old cabinet math wholesale. The balance peaked at 5,020.60 on spin 4 and bottomed out at 4,809.00. It's a trend that has flopped every single time. The longest stretch without a single win ran to 14 spins and ended on spin 352. Let's see: is Mustang Money the slot to prove me mistaken?

Mustang Money is a 5-reel, 3-row video slot with 100 pay lines. The line count is selectable, so you can drop below the full 100 if you want to. Its RTP is 94.38%, which is a fair bit lower than the more usual 95%-ish RTP I otherwise frequently see, and the panel in my capture ran 0.01 a line. That made a total bet of 1.00 across all 100 lines, and that is the stake I played the whole session at. This western themed slot with a horse twist gains from a free games feature with retriggers of 5 free games.

A full reel of Horses and a logo worth 100.00

Visually, it's rather dated looking. The card ranks from 9 up to A fill the low end, with the eagle, the gold bars and the cactus sunset sitting above them. That is likely to be a bit of a turn off to some players. The dollar and the mesa sunrise are the two behind the logo. Nonetheless, it's a reasonably well-crafted slot that is played along to a timeless western score that goes well with the game, and although the pace of the gameplay could have been raised a bit, the playability is fine tuned.

The premiums are made out of the horses, the coins and the remainder of the prairie trappings, and the Mustang Money logo is the most lucrative symbol. The dollar comes next, at 10.00 for five at that same 1.00 total bet. It awards you 100.00 for five across a complete pay line at a 1.00 total bet. That same logo doubles as the scatter, so it pays from any position on the reels rather than along a lit line. The Wild symbol arrives in the form of a horse. It substitutes for everything except the scatter and the Coin, and in my capture it turned up as a full three-high stack filling reel 3. In paid games it only shows on the three rightmost reels. That stacked reel brought in 2.70 on the spin, with 0.05 of it coming from three on line 18.

What ten free games are actually worth here

The free games feature is what it's all about in Mustang Money. It took until spin 402 of my 410 to show up at all. It's where the tiresome wait for the free games to drop can pay off, and to trigger it, players need to land 3 or more scattered Mustang Money symbols anywhere on the reels, which grants 10 free games. The bet and the number of lines carry over from the spin that triggered the round. The free games are played out on a distinct reel set to the main game, and a distinct paytable. The Horse wild narrows to reel 3 alone for the duration. Players will now profit from the Coin wild landing on reels 2 and 4, meaning each win it finishes is subject to a multiplier of x1 or x2 on reel 2 and x1 or x5 on reel 4, at random. The Coin stands in for every symbol except the scatter and the Horse.

Furthermore, several Coins in one win multiply together, each by its shown multiplier, and the feature can be retriggered. Each multiplier is displayed on the Coin symbol itself as it lands. 3 or more scatters landing during the feature will award another 5 free games. The round I saw ran out its 10 games without one.

The Minty Summary: A 94.38% cabinet port that hands its whole case to one feature, and over 410 spins at a 1.00 stake that feature turned up once, eight spins before I stopped, paying 5.80 for the wait.

410 spins for one Free Games Feature

The lone feature did little to help carry the game. Having wagered 410.00 in total, I finished 186.20 down. It felt sluggish and tiresome to me. Over 410 spins at a 1.00 stake I received 223.80 back, a 54.6% return, with only 88 spins paying anything at all, and half of those paid less than the stake. The one free games round I witnessed came on spin 402 and returned 5.80. The round moved the balance from 4,810.20 to 4,821.80. That is 5.8 times the stake and less than the 6.80 the base game paid on the same spin. All told, the feature accounted for 3% of everything the session won. Although the best single spin was 36 times the stake, which is not awful for any main game, it still doesn't make up for the dreadful gameplay. Mustang Money is far from the worst cabinet conversion I've witnessed. In fact, it's one of the better, but it doesn't stretch all the way, regrettably.