Buffalo King Megaways Slot Review

Pragmatic Play took its 2019 buffalo slot and rebuilt it with the Megaways engine. They made it a six-reel game with two to eight rows and up to 200,704 ways, but the reality is that the base game feels like a waiting room. You are just spinning to get to the free spins, because every multiplier in the machine is locked inside the bonus. The math runs at 96.52% RTP with five volatility bars out of five, and a 5,000x cap.

Wins form left to right on adjacent reels starting from the first reel. It uses standard tumbles, where winning symbols vanish, new ones drop into the gaps, and the chain keeps going until you hit a dead drop. During the base game, Buffalo King Megaways does not multiply anything. There are no sticky symbols or progressive meters to build up. A spin either makes a combination or it does not, and the balance walks straight down in clean stake-sized steps while you wait for the scatters.

The ways counter above the reels shows how rarely the grid actually opens up. The counter spends most of its time down in the low thousands, a long way from the 200,704 printed on the box. Wilds are also restricted to reels two, three, four, and five. They can extend a winning combination, but because they never land on the first reel, they can never start one.

You need four bonus symbols rather than the usual three to trigger the free spins. Landing four gets you 12 free spins and 5x your stake. Five scatters give 17 spins and 20x, while six scatters hand over 22 spins and 100x your stake. That six-scatter payout is actually a bigger prize than most of what the base game can produce before the round even starts.

There are two ways to speed up the trigger. The buy costs 100x your current stake and drops you straight into 12, 17, or 22 spins at random. At a $2 stake that is $200 for a round the reels would rather not hand over naturally. It runs at 96.50% against the base game's 96.52%, meaning you barely lose any returns for skipping the grind.

The ante bet is a worse deal. It raises your stake by a quarter, from 20 coins to 25, to roughly double your chance of triggering the bonus. However, it lowers the maximum win from 5,000x to 4,000x and disables the buy while it is switched on. If you want the highest ceiling, leave the toggle alone.

Inside the free spins, the game completely changes character. Different reel strips come in, and every wild that lands now carries a random 2x, 3x, or 5x multiplier. If you get multiple wilds in a single tumble sequence, they multiply against each other. The final accumulated figure applies to the whole sequence total once the tumbling stops.

You are chasing long tumbles seeded with wilds, and landing three or more bonus symbols adds five extra spins to keep the chain going. The game puts your odds of hitting the 5,000x cap at roughly one in 1,033,057 spins. If you actually reach that 5,000x ceiling during the free spins, the round ends immediately. The win is paid out, and any remaining free spins are forfeited on the spot.

The design is classic, loud Pragmatic Play. The reels sit against a purple and orange sunset over the American plains, framed by lashed-together wood. The magenta and gold buffalo on the splash screen looks genuinely annoyed, and the symbols include cougars, wolves, eagles, and moose over standard playing cards. Six buffalo across a way pay 400 coins against a spin that costs 20 coins, showing again that the base game is not where the money lives.

The original 2019 Buffalo King had a 93,750x maximum win, so anyone coming to this Megaways version expecting the same ceiling is going to be disappointed. The 5,000x cap is modest for a highly volatile Megaways slot, and the one in a million odds of hitting it are steep. We think it is only worth playing if you are willing to use the bonus buy. The base game is just empty dead time, but skipping straight to the multiplying wilds for 100x your stake with almost no RTP penalty makes it a fair proposition.