Wild Wild West: The Great Train Heist review
NetEnt released Wild Wild West: The Great Train Heist on 23 February 2017. The plot sits in the title: four outlaws, a train and comic-book drawing. The layout is the classic 5 reels by 3 rows, paying on 10 lines. All ten lines are always live and none can be switched off, so the stake is ten equal parts. Two bonus branches carry the game: a pick among three symbols, and free spins where a wheel decides which kind of Wild you play with.
Four outlaws inside comic panels
NetEnt’s own text sells the slot as comic-book charm, with four outlaws on a train robbery. The banner shows them standing in a row under a dusk sky with cacti behind them. Each has a distinct face and pose, so nobody blurs into a shared silhouette. Characters like that stay readable on a phone and in the bonuses, where the screen fills with effects.
By then NetEnt was already comfortable playing the western card in different ways. The same studio also makes the grim gunfights of the Dead or Alive series, while this one keeps a lighter, jokier mood. The numbers follow: the cap is 24 times lower than the first Dead or Alive, and so is the risk of sinking into a long dry spell.
Pick and Click: three bags on reels 1, 3 and 5
The feature starts when three Bonus symbols land together on reels 1, 3 and 5. It runs in the main game only; in free spins the same symbols do nothing. Since the positions are fixed you do not need to scan the whole grid, three columns are enough.
The game asks you to choose one of the three symbols. Behind it sits a coin worth between 5x and 50x your bet, and one prize is paid per trigger. The top of that range, 50x, is a tenth of the slot’s cap, so even the best pick leaves you far from the maximum if this feature is all you get.
What the two untouched symbols reveal
Once your prize is shown, the game reveals the values behind the other two symbols. It changes nothing in the payout, but you see what was on offer. From the player’s side the pick is blind: there are no hints, and left, middle and right are not different in any way, so it is not worth agonising over.
A fair way to view the feature is that it is short, with no retrigger and no switch to another mode. You pick, collect a coin and return to the reels. After frequent free spins that may sound modest, but it happens independently of them and adds a separate source of payouts to a session.
The Wild selector wheel before free spins
Free spins start when three or more Scatter symbols land anywhere on the reels. How many spins each Scatter count buys is listed in the game’s paytable; the public description only says that the round starts. The paytable can also be opened in the demo on the studio’s server, which needs no registration and shows the same grid, the same features and the same wheel.
Before the first free spin a Wild Selector wheel appears. You stop it, and it randomly chooses the Wild feature for the whole bonus. Each session gets exactly one such feature and it cannot be changed midway. Two rounds in a row can therefore feel completely different: one gives you a quick multiplier Wild, the other a plain one.
Four Wild personalities: regular, expanding, x2 and spreading
Four outcomes are possible: a regular Wild, an expanding Wild, an x2 multiplier Wild and a spreading Wild. The regular one simply substitutes for other symbols. The expanding one, as the name says, takes up more cells. The x2 version adds a multiplier to the win it joins. The spreading Wild, judging by its name, moves onto neighbouring positions.
The public description gives no detailed definitions for the last two modes. The logic of the wheel is still clear: each type boosts the free spins in its own way, so bonuses vary more than in a slot with a single fixed Wild.
The overlay Wild on reels 1-3 and the order of Scatter counting
In free spins an overlay Wild appears at random on reels 1 to 3 on every spin. It acts as whichever feature the wheel chose. The overlay is added on top of the picture and can land in any of those three columns, but never in the fourth or fifth.
One detail concerns order. Scatters are counted before the overlay Wild or its feature is applied. A Wild therefore cannot remove a Scatter or create one, and any retrigger depends only on what landed on the reels. New free spins can be won during the bonus: three or more Scatters trigger them again, as shown in the paytable.
Where Pick and Click beats free spins, and where it falls short
The two bonus branches have different characters. Pick and Click guarantees a payout: every trigger ends with a coin, and the coin is never below 5x the bet. Free spins work differently. The money in them depends on which Wild the wheel picked and how the reels fall, and nothing is guaranteed: results spread wider, and one bonus can differ sharply from the next.
Pick and Click thus works as a stabiliser. It will not lead to a record, but it never comes up empty either, which helps through dry stretches. Free spins bring the swings, from modest to notable payouts.
The RTP against other NetEnt games
An RTP of 96.74% means the game keeps 3.26% of the amount staked over the long run. That is above NetEnt’s median of about 96.55%, though several of the studio’s games return more: Mega Joker, Blood Suckers, Secrets of Atlantis, Hotline, Reel Rush, Blood Suckers 2, Dead or Alive, Dead or Alive 2 and Butterfly Staxx. The RTP is not split between base game and bonuses in the studio’s data, so you cannot tell how much of it comes from free spins.
Hit frequency and medium volatility
A winning spin arrives in 22% of rounds, roughly once every 4.5 spins. For a slot with a modest cap that is a normal rate, not a record one. A “win” in the studio’s figure can be small, below your stake: the frequency counts any hit, not whether the spin paid for itself. How often free spins arrive is not named.
Put the RTP over the hit frequency and a typical winning spin returns about 4.4 stakes: 0.9674 / 0.22 is roughly 4.40. That average blends very different things. Small line hits worth 0.3 to 1 stake pull it down, while a rare 50x coin from Pick and Click or a long free-spin round pull it up. The studio’s volatility index of 4.7 sits in its “medium” zone, under the 9.9 threshold for high.
The cap next to Dead or Alive
The maximum payout the studio gives is 500 times the bet. Whether a round ends once the cap is reached is not stated anywhere in the public description. The studio’s western siblings have figures orders of magnitude higher, and the risk is higher with them.
Wild Wild West: The Great Train Heist — Released: 23 Feb 2017; RTP: 96.74%; Top win: 500x; Volatility label: medium.
Dead or Alive — Released: 10 Nov 2009; RTP: 96.82%; Top win: 12,000x; Volatility label: very high.
Dead or Alive 2 — Released: 23 Apr 2019; RTP: 96.80%; Top win: 111,111x; Volatility label: very high.
Dead or Alive 3: Wanted — Released: 26 Mar 2026; RTP: 96.03%; Top win: 66,666x; Volatility label: high.
The four returns differ by less than 0.8 points, while the maximums differ by a factor of 24 to 222. So risk is paid for by structure, not by RTP: Wild Wild West hands money back more evenly and in smaller portions. Between the first two parts, Dead or Alive and Dead or Alive 2, the cap grew almost tenfold at nearly the same return; the details are laid out in the Dead or Alive vs Dead or Alive 2 comparison. The newest part, Dead or Alive 3: Wanted, came out in 2026 with a 66,666x cap.
NetEnt in 2017: Wild Wild West among its contemporaries
Four other NetEnt slots from 2017 make a fair comparison: Divine Fortune, Butterfly Staxx, Blood Suckers 2 and Finn and the Swirly Spin. Wild Wild West came second of the five. On the cap it sits in the lower half: only Butterfly Staxx and Finn and the Swirly Spin are held lower, at 300x each, and the other two reach higher. On return it is mid-table: Blood Suckers 2 and Butterfly Staxx beat it, Divine Fortune and Finn and the Swirly Spin trail it.
Divine Fortune — Released: 24 Jan 2017; RTP: 96.59%; Top win: 1,000x; Volatility label: medium.
Wild Wild West: The Great Train Heist — Released: 23 Feb 2017; RTP: 96.74%; Top win: 500x; Volatility label: medium.
Butterfly Staxx — Released: 21 Jun 2017; RTP: 96.80%; Top win: 300x; Volatility label: low.
Blood Suckers 2 — Released: 11 Oct 2017; RTP: 96.94%; Top win: 1,200x; Volatility label: low.
Finn and the Swirly Spin — Released: 23 Nov 2017; RTP: 96.62%; Top win: 300x; Volatility label: medium.
By these numbers the studio was building games with moderate ceilings that year. Bigger maximums in its range arrive later, in Dead or Alive 2 and in games with many more ways to win. More of the studio’s games sit on the NetEnt page.
