Jurassic Island II Slot by Playtech

The first Jurassic Island was an Ash Gaming title. This sequel moves the license over to Playtech's Vikings studio and builds the whole thing around a mechanic the original never had, the Wild Trail. It's a second-chance run of free spins that reward a spin for going nowhere. You get one spin with an extra wild dropped onto reel 4. If that spin pays nothing, you get another with the added wild shifted to reel 3 instead. Still nothing? A final spin plants a wild on reel 2. Each of those added wilds can land carrying a multiplier as high as 5x, so a dead spin can turn into three separate cracks at a comeback, each one with a fresh wild in a better position.

The wilds themselves are hatching eggs, a baby dino bursting out of the shell, and they come in four versions stamped 1x, 2x, 3x and 5x. Each one fills in for the paying dinosaurs and multiplies whatever combination it completes. The green roaring T-Rex is the top symbol and it arrives in full-reel stacks during normal play, so a single reel can turn solid T-Rex and feed the 1,024 ways in one drop. Everything sits in a dense green rainforest, tall trees and shafts of light behind the grid, a green T-Rex prowling in the distance while painted dinosaurs, a blue long-neck brontosaurus, a brown triceratops, a tan pterodactyl, a crested parasaurolophus, share jewel-tone tiles with stone-carved royals.

The free games are where it gets serious. That round layers in the multiplier wilds alongside a win guarantee, and stacking two or three of those egg multipliers on the same win is how the top payout of 23,290x actually happens. No buy button, so the scatters are the only way in. High variance, and it plays like it, long quiet stretches waiting for the wilds and the Trail to line up.