Bandit Bust Bonus Buy Slot Review

A masked outlaw shoots his way across a Wild West train robbery, and every bullet that lands on a Wild pushes that Wild's multiplier up by one. That shooting gallery is the whole game. The reels underneath are an ordinary 5x3 with 25 fixed lines paying left to right, and the paytable is small enough that a spin without the bandit turning up rarely amounts to anything.

This is the buy edition of Bandit Bust, released a few weeks behind the original in March 2024. Grid, symbols, features and the 96.00% base return all carry over untouched. What changes is a red Bonus Buy tab on the left rail with three price tiers, and the fact that buying moves the return in ways the prices do not advertise.

Sunset ochre everywhere. The reels sit in a plain wooden frame with scrolled brass corners, floating over a desert valley where a single railway track runs off toward the mesas, a saloon slumps on the left and a watchtower leans on the right. Cacti dot the foreground, a bird circles the haze. It is a calm, almost sleepy backdrop for a game about armed robbery, and the contrast works better than it should.

Symbol art splits cleanly in two. The royals are carved from painted wood in green, red, blue, teal and purple with gold caps, while the premiums are stolen luggage: a red gladstone bag, a green strapped suitcase, a blue clasp purse with a floral print. Two portraits in circular gold frames sit above them, a moustachioed gambler in a top hat with a cigar clamped in his teeth, and a woman in a wide brim hat pinned with a purple rose. The Bonus is a red steam locomotive. Jesse Dalton himself, red bandana and a revolver in each hand, only shows up for the title card and the Wild Bandit event. Warm, clean, and about as safe as frontier art gets.

Base game spins are quiet. Five of the best premium is worth 25x the total bet and the royals pay pennies, so line wins mostly slow the bleed. The session really only has two states: waiting for the bandit, or watching him shoot. That second state is short, and it is the only part of a base spin worth looking at (the animation never varies, and it still lands).

Free spins change the rhythm because two clocks run at once, the spin counter ticking down and the collection bar creeping up. A round that fires two Wild Bandit events in its opening spins feels nothing like one that fires none, and the distance between those outcomes is the whole tension of the bonus.

Buying compresses all of that into bursts. Ten spins at 55x is a fast, unforgiving loop where the bar usually stalls at one or two sectors and the round ends before the cylinders ever escalate; that is the honest median result, not a bad luck story. Fifteen spins gives the collection room to breathe, which is probably why the price climbs so steeply. The 12,548x ceiling wants a maxed cylinder throwing double digit Wilds onto several lines at once, and most players will likely never see a spin shaped like that.

Same game, same art, same math underneath, so the only question is whether the button earns its keep. It does, at one price. The 55x purchase for 10 spins returns more than sitting in the base game does, and a failed bonus at that cost is cheap enough to shrug off and go again.

The rest is a one idea game, and the idea is decent: a random event a player actually wants to see, with a bonus that slowly arms it. The paytable is too thin to carry a session alone, so a round where the bandit shows up once ends flat and there is no consolation in the line wins. And the original sits right next door at the same 96.00%, with nothing on the rail to tempt anyone.