Coyote Cash slot review

The screen is a stretch of Monument Valley with the reels standing in the sand like the front of a saloon, and the controls are those of the old Real Series: two arrows set the "line bet" from 0.01 upwards, two more choose how many of the twenty-five lines are in play. There is nothing to learn.

The screenshot shows a demo session ("Fun Play" is written at both corners of the screen) at 0.05 per line on all twenty-five lines, that is 1.25 per spin (twenty-five by 0.05), with the "Autoplay" button that repeats the spin until it is stopped. The drawing is a cartoon of the early 2000s, and it has aged as cartoons age when nobody redraws them, that is honestly.

The symbols tell the story without words: an armoured van full of cash, a rattlesnake with a knife between its teeth, a buffalo skull, an eagle in a sheriff's uniform and, for the small wins, the card values painted on planks riddled with bullet holes. The coyote himself is not in the picture; that is the nature of a wild symbol, which appears when it pleases.

The coyote is the "wild" (the joker replacing any other symbol to complete a line) and also the symbol paying most, since five of him on an active line pay 10,000 times the line bet, a ceiling that very few players will ever see. One example: a player who stakes 0.05 per line collects 500 for those five coyotes, while at 0.20 per line the same line pays 2,000!

The bag of loot is the "scatter" (the symbol paying wherever it lands), and three or more bags in view open the "free games", the studio's own name for free spins and the heart of the machine, in which every win is doubled, the coyote's wins included. A player who has sat through fifty spins of card values learns there whether the evening was worth the dust; three bags do not come often.

Above the reels a counter shows the "random jackpot", the progressive prize of the "Real Series" titles, which can fall at the end of any spin, at any stake and without any combination of symbols, because a slice of every bet feeds it until somebody wins it. It read 1,421.86 in our session, in play credits that nobody would have been paid.

RealTime Gaming does not print one theoretical return for Coyote Cash: the "RTP" (the share of the stakes returned to the players over millions of spins) is chosen by each casino among the settings that the studio offers, and it appears in the "help" pages of the game, where it appears at all. We would advise you to look for the figure before depositing, since few players do.

Two casinos with the same game can pay back differently, which is unusual among the studios of Europe (Play'n GO prints 96.19 per cent on Golden Caravan everywhere) and ordinary among those serving the American market. The volatility, instead, is the same everywhere, since it belongs to the game and not to the casino, and the data call it medium.

The demo confirms it: the balance moves in small steps, with a jump when the coyote lines up or the free games arrive, and it rarely collapses. A player who stakes 1.25 per spin with a hundred of credit has eighty spins of road ahead (one hundred divided by 1.25), enough, in our view, to see a hold-up.

Coyote Cash sits in the catalogue of almost every casino carrying RealTime Gaming, above all the houses of the Deckmedia group (SlotoCash, Uptown Aces, Uptown Pokies, Fair Go, Ozwin and Decode), which address the international market under a licence of Curaçao, an "offshore" licence that earns a conservative rating in our reviews. Our SlotoCash review says what such a licence is worth in practice, and our world list of no-deposit bonuses gathers the offers that those houses publish.

The offers can change, and the demo, which is the way we tried it, opens at most of these houses after registration with the "Fun Play" button of the screenshot. A "free chip" (a no-deposit bonus of a few dollars) is the other way to see the coyote if you would rather not pay with your own money.

Its "wagering" (the number of times the bonus must be bet) and its "max cashout" (the ceiling on withdrawals) must be read first, as our page on free spins explains: a chip of ten with a wagering of forty times asks for four hundred in bets before a withdrawal, and the free games alone will not provide them! The chip is a way of looking, not a way of earning.

Coyote Cash is a slot of the old school, and it asks of the player what the old school asked: patience through the card values, a modest stake, and the acceptance of a return set by the casino rather than by the studio. In its favour stand the doubled free games, the random jackpot and a humour at work twenty years on; against it, the unpublished RTP and a paytable ruled by the card values.

For a player who likes the frontier and wants a relaxed evening at small stakes it is in our view one of the more likeable titles of the Real Series, to be tried in demo first, as we did. A player who wants a published return and a modern mechanism will find both in Thunderstruck Gold Blitz Extreme, the one slot we rate (4 out of 5), and the hub of slot and game reviews lists the rest, from the ten-line desert of Golden Caravan to a video bingo of the Roaring Twenties (18+).