Zulu Gold

Chisel-jawed adventurer Kane is back, in the Zulu Gold slot from Elk Studios! Not content with seeking his fortune in Kathmandu, Ecuador, Tahiti and New Orleans, Kane is now having a go at deeper darkest Africa.

Let’s pack our bags and head on a mission to this huge continent, where there’s wins of 10,000x your bet up for grabs! Plus, mystery symbols and 4×4 jumbo block icons…

The Graphics

The design here is absolutely excellent, with a backdrop of a Zulu temple and 2 warrior shields flanking the reel set. They are also some rather majestic animals filling the reels, while your spins are accompanied by an excellent tribal soundtrack. Let’s see if this game gets as popular as something like the Immortal Romance slot from Microgaming.

Zulu Gold Slot Game Play

Zulu Gold slot has 6 reels, 4 rows and from 4,096 to 262,144 ways to win. To create a winning combo, 3x or more of the same symbol must be on the next reel from left to right. It’s one of those crazy new games like the Hammerfall slot that seems to pack a ton of ways to win in there.

Kane is the highest paying icon in the game, along with an Elephant, Rhino and Buffalo as the other premium icons. Your low paying symbols are made up of colourful wall paintings and carvings.

When it comes to the Wild symbols, you’ll see both Wild Walkers and Charged Wilds – but more on these below… The Scatter symbol here is the ‘Bonus’ symbol with the Serengeti sunset on it.

This game takes the cascade reels mechanic but goes one step further as for every ‘avalanche’ that falls, the number of rows in play will increase, as will the ways to win:

4 Rows – 4,096 Ways
5 Rows – 15,625 Ways
6 Rows – 46,656 Ways
7 Rows – 117,649 Ways
8 Rows – 262,144 Ways

Charged Wild
This is a nice little extra. When a Charged Wild lands, it locks into position and is now given 3 lives. Whenever it creates a winning combo, a life is used up.

Walker Wild
This handy little icon will trigger when the mighty lion’s head icon hits the reels. It will move to reel a new position on each spin leaving sticky wilds behind wherever it goes. Excellent!

The Bonuses

Zulu Stacks
Zulu Stacks are a stack of identical icons that can land on any spin up to 2x, 3x or 4x rows high – which can bring in some nice base game wins

Jumbo Blocks
Your reel icons can land in a whole host of sizes from standard 1×1, 2×2, 3×3 and even MEGA 4×4 ( the equivalent of 16 standard symbols). They will drop to the bottom of the grid when they land, and obliterate all symbols in its way.

X-iter Buy Feature
Zulu Gold is the first Gold Series game to come with ELK Studios X-iter features. Here, you can pay more to access different  levels of extra features – this is unavailable in the UK by the way.

Zulu Gold Free Spins
Land 3x or more bonus icons and it’s Free Spins time, which means from 10 -25 drops for you – the round also comes with a progressive win multiplier.

You’ll start off with a ‘safety level’ of 4 rows of icons, but whenever you make a winning drop, this safety level will increase by x1 and won’t revert on the next spin. This means you’re guaranteed to land up to 8 symbols per reel during this feature aka the max 262144 ways to win.

The Monkey Verdict

The Gold Series is hugely popular, and in this latest instalment, Elk Studios have taken the best bits from the other games and put them all into the Zulu Gold slot. And it works!

It’s very volatile indeed, so some caution is needed, but you will have a lot of fun playing this ELK release.

5 out of 5 bananas