African Legends slot: Will be linked to the Wheel of Wishes Major Jackpot fund

Last week, Microgaming revealed some exciting news for jackpot slots fans with the official announcement of five new progressive jackpot slot games in the pipeline.

Two of these games would be tied in to the Wowpot Progressive Jackpot network, which currently just has the one game, Wheel of Wishes, offering all four jackpot prizes.

Two of the other games would be linked in to the massively popular Mega Moolah progressive jackpot network which would make them the fourth and fifth newly released games over the last couple of years to join that hugely popular progressive jackpot network.

Now, we are going to bring you preview articles on all of those games over the coming weeks, so I don't want to talk about them at any great length here, as in this article we are going to focus on something a little bit different, which is the fifth progressive jackpot slot in the series announced last week, African Legends.

So what do we know about this game and why does it appear to be a little different to the other four progressive jackpot games announced at the same time? Well in this article, we are going to tell you all that we have discovered about the game and precisely why this game is different to other progressives.

Who is developing African Legends?

African Legends is being developed by Slingshot Studios, who have produced a number of top games for Microgaming over the years including Cash of Kingdoms, Zombie Hoard, Banana Odyssey and the atmospheric A Dark Matter.

We have not heard an official date for release direct from Microgaming as yet, but we have conducted a little research ourselves and we believe that this new slot will be released sometime in early October 2020.

However, Microgaming have previously offered new games to certain groups of casinos on an exclusive basis for a couple of weeks or so before a general release, plus they sometimes feature forthcoming game releases on promotions across the network. As such, it may be prudent to keep an eye out for any of these developments nearer the time, if you want to be one of the first to try your hand at the game.

Is African Legends a Progressive Jackpot Game?

The next piece of information we need to confirm is that African Legends is a progressive jackpot game, but it will be a progressive jackpot game with a difference. That difference being that instead of being tied to all four of the Wowpot Progressive Jackpot prizes, the African Legends slot will only offer you the chance to win the Wowpot Major progressive jackpot prize.

That means the massive Wowpot Progressive Jackpot, which is seeded at £2 million and which at the moment is available to be won for £5.2 million+ will not be available on the slot.

However, the Wowpot Major Jackpot is still a very sizeable prize. Seeded at a minimum of £50,000, the prize has been awarded several times already since the games release and has regularly paid out prizes of over £200,000 and sometimes even more than £300,000. You can see all the Major Jackpot wins on wheelofwishes.net.

This means that there will still be an extensive progressive prize available to be won on the African Legends slot, even though it is tied to just one of the four progressive jackpots that is part of the Wowpot Network.

This is an exciting new development for slot players and ushers in the exciting possibility of specific slot games being designed to target specific progressive jackpot funds on games that offer multiple prizes, such as Wowpot and of course the Mega Moolah slot.

How much will African Legends cost to play and how much can you win?

Slingshot Studios have designed the game to be a 5x3 reel slot which has a total of 243 Ways to Win in play rather than standalone pay lines. The good news is that the game is not expensive to play with spins starting at £0.25 per spin, but you can ramp up the action to around £25.00 per spin if you are a higher roller.

One thing to note is that the higher your initial bet, the higher your chances are of triggering the progressive jackpot.

Excluding the progressive jackpot, the most you can win in the game is 1,200x your stake, which is a decent amount, if not quite as high as some other slots. The volatility of the slot, in practice play puts it in the medium variance range.

What are some of the key features of the African Legends slot?

What we do know about the African Legends slot is that it will have a set up similar to the Jungle Jim series of games. By that we mean the 5x3 reel set up and then Rolling Reels and Multiplier Trails in play in order to help players land successive wins from a single spin. The look of the slot also has echoes of the Jungle Jim series too, with the symbols looking like they have been carved from square rocks.

In the base game, Rolling Reel wins offer multipliers ranging from 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, 8x and 10x respectively.

If you can land four or more triggers of the Rolling Reels bonus from the base game, then you will win some Free Spins. The amount of Free Spins you win is determined by how many Rolling Reels wins you trigger. Trigger four and you win 12 Free Spins with the 5x multiplier, land five and it is 15 Free Spins with the 6x multiplier, hit six successive wins and it is 18 Free Spins and an 8x multiplier and land seven and you will land the maximum 20 Free Spins and the 10x multiplier.

However, if you manage to land eight successive Rolling Reels wins in succession on the reels, then you will trigger the Progressive Jackpot prize and that fund, whatever the size of it, will then become yours.

To help you land wins there are special symbols on the reels such as the Wild symbols which can be used to substitute for other symbols and they can also land stacked on the third reel of the slot to try and facilitate a few more of those big money wins.

There is also a Wild Blast feature which can trigger entirely at random in the base game and when it does, up to five positions on the reels can turn Wild and help you land some great value wins. The Wild Blast feature only triggers on a standard spin though, not any Rolling Reels trigger.

Symbols on the reels include a number of different animal symbols as the higher value options, while playing card symbols are the lower value symbols on the slot.

What to expect when African Legends is released?

It is going to be interesting to see what appeal the African Legends slot has and I am sure Microgaming will be viewing how the game does with interest. Will players be keen to play the game with just the Wowpot Major Jackpot on offer, rather than all four Wowpot jackpot prizes? That is going to be the big factor in the success of the African Legends slot and in truth, that could rely somewhat on the two other Wowpot-linked slots that are also set to be released during the year, which are Fortunium Gold and Sisters of Oz.

However, what is important to focus on with the African Legends slot is not what it doesn't have to offer, but rather more what it does. If Microgaming had released this slot with a standalone progressive jackpot fund of £50,000 as a bare minimum, people would have been queuing up to play the game. However, essentially that is what African Legends has to offer.

Personally, I think that the African Legends slots has a lot going for it. Rolling Reels and Multiplier Trails are always very good options for players and a bet size of 0.25 per spin is about bang on the money what players are comfortable with when betting on progressive jackpot games and for that, I would expect every spin to have a chance of triggering the jackpot amount (although I stress, I have not found confirmation of that yet officially, but I would be surprised if that was not the case).

All in all, this is an exciting new type of progressive and if it is a hit, I am sure it will not be the only game released that is tied in to the second largest progressive prize on a big Microgaming progressive jackpot slot.