Deadly 5: Slot Overview

The Wild West still has a strong hold on the slots scene, and this time it’s software provider Push Gaming taking a shot at the ever-popular theme. The game is called Deadly 5, and considering Push Gaming’s habit of going big on most fronts, it would be understandable to approach with a bit of cautious apprehension. Interestingly, Deadly 5 is actually fairly restrained by Push Gaming standards, offering a compact feature set and a noticeably lower max win than this software provider typically delivers. To see whether Deadly 5 is the kind of online slot you’ll want to face off against, let’s dig in.

Deadly 5 plays out on a 5-reel, 4-row layout, set on an empty street in the heart of an old-school Wild Western town. A saloon stands on the left, with other buildings and a couple of cacti framing the grid. Beyond that, there isn’t a lot going on. Visually, Deadly 5 looks solid without being exceptional, presenting a familiar frontier scene in a pleasant way. The soundtrack follows suit, capturing some of that Western flavour. Overall, the visuals and audio are perfectly serviceable—doing what they need to do without really standing out.

Under the hood, this online slot uses a medium volatile math model, with standard RTPs of 88.29% to 96.39%, depending on the version you’re playing. It’s available across desktop, tablet, and mobile, and the default bet range runs from 10 p/c to $/€100 per paid spin. The grid contains 20 paylines, and wins land when matching symbols appear on adjacent reels along one, starting from the left-most side.

The top regular paying symbols are the characters Billy the Bull, Eliza ‘Ryder’, Irene ‘Bullseye’, and El Fuego. A five-of-a-kind with one of these characters pays 37.5 to 75 times the stake. Lower down the pay scale, horseshoes, boots, a flask, and pistol symbols return 4-5 times the stake for a five-symbol win. The Sheriff’s Badge wild appears on all reels and substitutes for any regularl pay symbol. On top of that, Sheriff Badges are also the best-paying symbol in Deadly 5, awarding up to 250x the bet for a line of five.

Deadly 5: Slot Features

If you’re hoping for a barrage of Western-themed creativity, Deadly 5 probably won’t meet that kind of hype.

Sheriff’s Bonus Feature

The headline extra is the Sheriff’s Bonus feature, which activates when 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols land, awarding 10, 15, or 20 free spins, plus an immediate payout of 3x, 10x, or 50x the bet, respectively. During free spins, a Sheriff Wild symbol remains on the rightmost reel for the full duration of the round. This Sheriff Wild Symbol is a Full Reel Sticky Wild symbol that can substitute for any regular pay symbol. While the bonus is running, the four high pay symbols can also turn into Expanding Wild symbols, substituting all pay symbols.

Positioned above the reels are 4 wanted posters, each tied to one of the high pay symbols. Whenever the matching high pay symbol lands beneath its wanted poster, it expands to cover the whole reel and turns wild. These four aren’t sticky, though, and they disappear before the next free spin.

Mystery Sheriff’s Bonus Feature

If the star icon shows up, selecting it lets players purchase the Mystery Sheriff’s Bonus feature for 80x the bet. When buying in, there’s a 60.79% chance of triggering 10 free spins, an 18.04% chance of landing 15 free spins, or a 20.99% chance of securing 20 free spins for the Sheriff’s Bonus feature. The RTP when buying free spins is 96.51%.

Deadly 5: Slot Verdict

Playing Deadly 5 for this review felt a bit like confusing the main dish at an absurdly fancy restaurant for the starter. Once it was over, it left the impression that something else was supposed to happen—like there was a hidden ending, or one of those secret tracks at the end of a CD you only find by skipping past the final song. Is that even still a thing? The previous Push Gaming slot we reviewed was the mighty Mad Cars, which punished us more than most games did at the time. So the assumption was that Deadly 5 would be a hard-hitting, no-mercy Western slot. Instead, Deadly 5 ended up being almost the reverse: a good-looking game with limited features and a low (for Push Gaming) max win.

Still, variety matters, and it may be that Push Gaming is aiming Deadly 5 at a different type of player than usual. Its stripped-back approach could easily be one of its biggest appeals; however, the base game is so light that it comes across as being built around bonus buying, since that’s where the features really get room to perform. Even then, the features are simple, with full reel wilds doing most of the heavy lifting. The Sheriff’s Bonus feature has faint similarities to the Duel at Dawn Bonus Round in Hacksaw Gaming’s Western slot Wanted Dead or a Wild, only without the multipliers or the intense mood. In comparison, Deadly 5 is bright, clean, and streamlined, keeping complications to a minimum. It also doesn’t measure up to Wanted Dead or a Wild or the best Western-themed slots in terms of potential, topping out at 5,000x the bet. On the plus side, the odds of landing the max win are 1 in 564,525.

Deadly 5 is unexpectedly brief and straightforward for a Push Gaming slot, and it doesn’t demand attention in the way some of the studio’s other releases do. There aren’t any glaring downsides, but there’s also nothing particularly jaw-dropping. Deadly 5 simply does its job and moves on, without trying to leave a major mark on the Western slots landscape.