Wild Toro Slot Review

If you've been playing slots for a while, you've probably crossed paths with ELK Studios' Wild Toro. Released back in November 2016, this Spanish bullfight-themed game plays out on a 5x4 grid. Looking back at it now, it's fascinating to see how its clever "walking wild" mechanic laid the foundation for a long series, long before the industry became obsessed with massive multipliers and bonus buys.

So how does the original hold up today?

Unlike a lot of modern slots, Wild Toro is incredibly straightforward. There are no scatter symbols, no special side-bets, and no option to buy your way into a bonus. Everything revolves around one feature: landing the Toro symbol on the fifth reel.

When he drops, he acts as a walking wild. Each step he takes to the left gives you a free respin, and the walk goes on until he reaches the first reel. But the real fun happens when the Matador shows up.

During normal spins, the Matador is honestly a bit of a nuisance: he acts as a blocker that gets in the way of your paylines. But if he lands while the Toro is doing his walk, the game completely flips the script. The bull will literally charge across the screen to knock the Matador off the board, moving vertically and horizontally and leaving a trail of wilds in his wake.

It's a really entertaining mechanic, though it does have a couple of quirks. Because the game uses fixed paylines, sometimes the bull can turn an entire column wild and you still won't connect the win you were hoping for. Also, the wilds from a charge pay on the respin where the charge happens, and then the Toro takes his next step.

To be completely fair about the volatility, this game can make you wait for the action. The Toro can only land on the fifth reel, and that one reel is the whole way into the walk. Every Matador on the board during the walk gets charged, and the Toro keeps attacking until none are left. There is a secondary feature designed to help you out: landing three Matadors triggers the Matador Respin Challenge, sticky respins that give you a better chance of drawing the bull, and every extra Matador adds one more respin. That's just the nature of slots, though!

Wild Toro is the oldest game in a sprawling ELK series, and on the numbers it really stands out from the later Toro titles. It offers a 2,250x maximum win and a highly respectable 96.4% RTP (Return to Player).

If you look at the later games, like Book of Toro, Buffalo Toro or Wild Toro 3, ELK pushed the max wins up to 10,000x or more. But to pay for that potential, they had to drop the RTP down to around 94% or 95%. The original game also has a solid hit frequency of about 24.9%, which sits near the top of the series' range, behind only Wild Toro 3 and Toro Shogun.

The later games didn't just slap a new coat of paint on the game; they really cranked up the engines. Book of Toro keeps a bull walking left but adds a climbing multiplier and bonus buys up to 500x, while Buffalo Toro and Wild Toro 3 move to bigger or shifting grids. The original Wild Toro, by contrast, is a purist's game. It stays strictly on its fixed lines, features absolutely no multipliers, and just lets you spin.

If you look around the slot world, you can find its walking wild in a few other places. ELK's own Lake's Five is very similar, though it saves its walking wilds for the free spins round. NetEnt's Jack and the Beanstalk 2 also uses the leftward walking wild, but pairs it with multipliers for a much higher max win.

Wild Toro built the engine that ELK is still using today. While the studio eventually had to lower the RTP and crank up the volatility to keep up with modern slot trends, the original remains a charming, fair, and innovative game that is still worth a few spins if you appreciate a classic.