Willy Wildwing Slot Review

If you're a fan of that classic 1930s rubber-hose cartoon style, Hacksaw Gaming's Willy Wildwing (due out in November 2026) will definitely catch your eye. It's a great-looking game, though under the hood, it's going to feel pretty familiar if you've played their other recent releases. The gameplay revolves almost entirely around an expanding wild mechanic, but with a specific catch that shapes how it pays.

The main feature here is the Airplane symbol. When it lands, it flies up the reel, leaving a trail of "Wild Smoke" clouds, some of which carry multipliers. There's also a random Smoke Machine that occasionally blasts extra multiplier clouds onto the grid. A quick note on the math: if you get multiple multipliers on a winning line, they add together rather than multiplying each other.

The problem is that the Airplane only takes off if expanding will actually create a winning combo. If it can't connect with anything, it just sits there as a dead symbol. It can be a little frustrating to see it land and do nothing, but it's a strict rule the game applies on every spin.

For those who like to buy features, you've got options. "Hangar Hero" costs 80x your bet and boosts your chances of landing Airplanes, while "Head in the Clouds" costs 200x and guarantees at least one Airplane per spin. You can also switch on BonusHunt FeatureSpins, a standing bet: at 2x your stake per spin, each spin is three times more likely to trigger a bonus naturally. Alternatively, you can pay 75x per spin for High-Flying FeatureSpins, which guarantees at least two Airplanes land, though this turns off the scatter symbols entirely, making it a pure Airplane bet with no way to trigger the actual bonus.

I bought the 200x "Head in the Clouds" bonus. I managed a retrigger, giving me 12 spins total. Because of that strict expansion rule, a guaranteed Airplane doesn't actually mean a guaranteed win. About a third of my spins paid nothing: the promised Airplane landed, couldn't make a connection, and the spin just ended.

However, when the board does connect, you see exactly why the game is designed this way. On one of my spins, the Smoke Machine fired seven random clouds onto the board, an Airplane expanded to join them, and I hit two lines of the top-paying symbol with an added 9x multiplier. That single spin paid out 228x my bet, rescuing the whole session, and the round finished at about 1.5x the cost of the bonus buy. It really highlights how boom-or-bust this slot is: you have to weather a lot of dead spins, but it only takes one massive hit to turn a profit.

It's worth mentioning that Willy Wildwing feels like part of a very specific Hacksaw blueprint. Supernova Shooting Stars, due on 5 November, has the exact same conditional wild mechanic and adding multipliers at an identical 96.26% RTP, though that one has a smaller grid and a lower 5,000x max win.

The nearest in shape is Buried by Night, due on 10 November. It uses the same layout and nearly the same menu of bonus buys, just with a horizontal expansion instead of a vertical one. The main difference is the potential: Buried by Night will offer a 15,000x max win, which is exactly double the 7,500x cap on Willy.

Compared to what other studios are doing with aviation themes and expanding wilds, Willy is definitely on the more cutthroat side. Relax Gaming's Cloudforge, due in mid-October, for instance, lets multipliers multiply each other for crazy numbers, while Mancala's Cactus Crew: Wild Duels gives you sticky expanded wilds during free spins. Willy Wildwing doesn't give you those safety nets. Every spin is a fresh board, relying entirely on the thrill of lining up that one perfect, heavy-hitting strike.