Valhalla Wild Winter Slot Review

02/01/2025 | Categories: Bitcoin Slots Reviews, Hacksaw Gaming Slots | Published by: Joe | Last updated: 02/01/2025

Bullshark Games is a game provider for which we have a dedicated casino page where you can find the best crypto-gambling sites housing this studio’s releases. Yet, we do not think we have ever looked at a Bullshark Games slot in-depth, giving you our opinion on it. The truth of the matter is, that this is still an up-and-coming game developer, one with just over a dozen creations to its name, that are available in over one hundred and fifty casino sites.

Valhalla Wild Winter is one of Bullshark’s latest releases, appearing online on December 17th, 2024, utilizing the OpenRGS platform, which is a Remote Gaming Server run by Hacksaw Gaming. The game has not notched much success anywhere outside of Poland and Hungary in the last month of 2024, but it looks like one of Bullshark’s better-looking titles, so we decided to give it a shot. It should be widely available thanks to Hacksaw’s OpenRGS platform delivering access to this slot in loads of regulated markets. Hence, it should not be too difficult to track down, and with only a size of 16 MB, we assume it will run smoothly on most devices, regardless of the operating system.

Design & Theme

Viking slots are a big deal in the online gambling realm, and you probably know this if you have spent some time enjoying reel-spinning gameplay via your phone, tablet, or desktop computer. For the purposes of this article, we tried to perform a count of all the reel spinners we could find boasting this motif, and we came up with the figure – three hundred and fifty-four. We have surely missed a few if not many, but from the batch of titles with this theme that we did locate, the most popular ones were Masters of Valhalla from Snowborn Studios, Gemhalla by BGaming, and Pragmatic Play’s Might of Freya Megaways.

For those not in the know, Valhalla is a hall in Norse mythology, where the souls of warriors travel to. It is a place in the home of the Norse gods, Asgard, which is presided over by the most revered Norse god of them all – Odin. In Valhalla Wild Winter, a massive warrior with a long white beard seeks to earn his spot in Valhalla, as he stands left of the reel grid, carrying a hammer that is almost as tall as he is. The setting here is a mountainous one, in the dead of winter, with the reels spinning inside a stone structure flanked by two stones with glowing rune symbols on them. We are unsure if the warrior is a 3D model or a clearly animated 2D one, but he has good lighting and stands out from the painterly backdrop.

The gaming action here is accompanied by a movie-type dramatic soundtrack and apt audio effects. The whole presentation gives off a nice sense of mood and is a bit gloomy and atmospheric. We think it’s pretty good overall. On a desktop, you will find the spin functions to the right of the reel grid, your balance/bet info below the 5×4 grid, and the settings button in the bottom left corner.

Specs & Gameplay

As noted above, Valhalla Wild Winter has a five-reel, four-row token setup. The variance level here is high, and this game, which has fourteen paylines, comes in two RTP versions. The first, and more common one, is a variant of this slot with a return-to-player setting of 96.2%, and the second, less available one, has an RTP of 94.34%. The max win in both stands at x12,000 your stake, and you can make wagers starting from a size of $0.10 up to $100 per spin in this Bullshark reel spinner. We have no info regarding the hit variance, but we can tell you that the RTPs here have been calculated through ten billion rounds simulated.

Wins in Valhalla Wild Winter happen when three, four, or five matching tokens land on one of the predefined winning lines, with these only paying from combos hit on adjacent reels starting from the leftmost one. The symbols in this slot are divided into two groups. You have the low-pay card royals that all deliver wins of x2 when five identical ones land, and then you have a shield, a helmet, an ax, a polar bear, and the mighty warrior himself, yielding prizes from x3 to x10, in the described order when five matching symbols from this group appear on the reels.

The golden hammer is the wild of this game, and it pays out the same, x10, as the warrior when five of these hammers show up on the 5×4 layout. A statue of what we think is Odin’s face chiseled from rock, adorned with a golden helmet, is the scatter in Valhalla Wild Winter.

Bonus Features

You get a global multiplier in this slot that begins at x1, boosted by non-winning wilds, up to a value of x100, with the contributing wilds staying on the grid. The mentioned ones are the additive values, and there are possible multiplicative values up to x10. The former ones get added first, and then come the latter.

In the Frozen Fortune Hunt feature, you have wild symbol pots, where wilds in view get collected. On the following spin, these get randomly placed onto the grid, and if they go over an existing wild, the global multiplier gets boosted. Three to five scatters give you eight, ten, or twelve gaming rounds in the Frozen Fortune Hunt mode. If you activate this round with five Odin scatters, then you get ensured at least three wilds. The global multiplier here grows until a win occurs, which resets it.

You have three bonus buy options in Valhalla Wild Winter – x3, x50, and x150. These get you five times more likely to enter the free spins, at least five wilds, and direct access to the Frozen Fortune Hunt, respectively.

GOSU Verdict

While Valhalla Wild Winter did not impress us, we think this is an okay game and one of the better recent releases from the Viking sub-genre. It has decent features and a cool look, a blend that makes this game playable for multiple sessions. It is nothing earth-shattering or unique, but it is far better than the reel-spinning fare we usually review.