Wild Frames Slot – Free Demo

Frames that sit dead until the charger fills

Do you recall when a cluster grid still seemed like a rarity rather than a house standard? Wild Frames arrived in December 2019. It's been imitated and reworked plenty of times since. The frames it leaves behind carry win multipliers, and the rules set no cap on how high one of them can be upgraded. I heard of Play'n GO placing a frame-building mechanic on a 7x7 grid. Two spins in my run paid more than 300 times the stake. I didn't agree to review it because I assumed it was going to be superb — I already had a hunch it wouldn't — but because the mechanic itself might draw some curiosity, and after all, that's how I pick out slots to review since I can't possibly review them all.

The first thing you will spot when starting up this slot is the grid: you have the 7x7 bank of symbols in the centre of the screen, and a charge meter running alongside it that fills up one notch per winning symbol. A single large cluster therefore moves the meter several notches at once. Every wild that drops leaves a frame behind on the spot it dropped on. Those frames rest there doing nothing at all until the meter is full.

Five touching symbols and a wild that leaves a mark

The layout is nothing out of the usual, as thrilling as it may appear to some. This is a 7x7 cluster pays slot where a win requires 5 or more identical symbols adjoining horizontally and/or vertically. The stake selector I had in front of me ran 0.60, 0.80, 1.00, 1.20 and 1.60, and I played every spin at 1.00. It arrives with plenty of features. Three of them fire on the way up the charge meter and the fourth is the one the game takes its name from. I'll run through them all one by one, but the developers have definitely overcooked things here even if the emphasis is more on amusement rather than potential. Across my run the balance topped out at 25,780.90 and bottomed at 24,833.40.

One spin can pay several times over, since winning symbols are cleared and the rest drop down to fill the holes. Every symbol cleared in those cascades counts towards the meter as well. I found the pause between cascades a bit tiring after a few minutes, however — perhaps I'm just getting old.

Four suits, a Bell, a Star and a Seven

Symbols on the grid comprise the four suits — Club, Spade, Heart and Diamond. Cluster sizes in the table step up from 5 all the way to 30 or more. Spade and Club pay the same, and Heart and Diamond pay the same. Above them are the non-suit symbols: Bell, Star, Gem and Seven, and the latter is the most rewarding. Bell is the weakest of those four at every cluster size.

A wild symbol is also present which substitutes all symbols, and a wild dropping on a spot that already holds a frame upgrades that frame with a win multiplier. Those multipliers sit dormant along with the frames until the meter fills. Only the largest multiplier is applied for each winning cluster. A cluster running across three upgraded frames therefore pays on the biggest of the three and ignores the rest. Should a spin yield no win at all, 4 to 6 wilds are added to the grid at random.

There is also a Transform feature. It is the first of the three checkpoints on the way to a full meter. It comes into play once the meter hits 20 charges, and what it does is that it converts the non-suit symbols into one kind of non-suit symbol to boost the winning potential. You will scarcely even notice a difference, however, since it triggers so early on the meter.

Transform, Wildcard, Shatter and the fourth one

You need to grasp that you will have to fill the charge meter to be able to get anything out of it at all, if you choose to play this slot. The meter counts winning symbols rather than spins, so a spin that pays nothing adds nothing to it. Now, collecting the 80 winning symbols needed to trigger Wild Frames is not simple, and it often took me a ridiculous number of spins. Three triggers in 350 spins was what it came to for me. My first one landed on spin 241, and the next two came 37 and 36 spins after that. They paid 601.00, 24.00 and 26.00 at a 1.00 stake. The feature is only worth what the frames on the grid have been upgraded to, so even then you're not promised much. If you do, however, this is what you can anticipate:

• Transform - at 20 charges, converts non-suit symbols into one kind of non-suit symbol.
• Wildcard - at 40 charges, adds 3-6 wilds to the grid.
• Shatter - at 60 charges, clears all suit symbols from the grid.
• Wild Frames - at 80 charges, all frames become live and convert their symbols into wilds, with 2 additional frames granted at random for every 10 charges beyond that.

Minty’s Final Note: Of the 1,112.60 the session won, 651.00 arrived inside three Wild Frames rounds, and 601.00 of that came from the single round on spin 241.

What 350 spins at a 1.00 stake gave back

The mechanic is nothing new. The slot, however, is most definitely not the disaster I anticipated, and some review sites will probably urge all fans of cluster grids to "give it a try". My balance finished at 25,762.60 from a 25,000.00 start. Over 350 spins at a stake of 1.00 I bet 350.00 and won 1,112.60, a return of 317.9%. One spin accounted for more than half of that total. The three Wild Frames rounds I did set off paid 651.00 between them, 59% of everything I won. Strip them out and the 350 spins return 461.60, or 131.9%.

The game is slow to give anything up. Only 66 spins in 350 paid at all, 29 of those paid less than the stake, and there was one run of 19 spins that paid nothing. That dry run ended on spin 145. There is one solid reason to play this slot, and that's spin 241. The peak balance came later, 25,780.90 on spin 278. It paid 601 times the stake on its own. The next best was spin 237 at 339 times the stake, with no feature round attached. I suppose you could say the frames were worth waiting for.