Howling Wolves Megaways: Slot Overview

Booming Games enters the Megaways arena after securing a Megaways licence from Evolution owned Big Time Gaming, launching its first title built around the famous variable-reel mechanic. Rather than pushing into bold new territory, the developer has opted to revisit an earlier release. That approach rarely creates much buzz, and when it’s combined with some of the lowest win potential seen in a Megaways slot, it’s difficult to see what Booming was aiming for here.

The original Howling Wolves arrived in the second half of 2020, fitting neatly into the North American wilderness slot theme. It featured nods to Native American culture across a 5×3 reel layout, alongside plenty of wolf-driven action. Those core ingredients return in the Megaways version, but the game now shifts to a 6-reel setup, delivering up to 117,649 ways to win. The shadowy forest backdrop also makes a comeback, offering a welcome change from the more typical deserts, plains, and canyon scenes. Full moons still loom through the trees in the upper-right corner, although there’s no werewolf transformation at any stage, in case you were hoping for one.

Like the original, Howling Wolves Megaways is a highly volatile slot and runs smoothly on whichever device you prefer. The RTP has been nudged up by a few points to 96%, but the maximum win has been cut to under half of the previous game’s level. The reason isn’t clear, but for now it’s better to focus on the core mechanics. One key rule is that winning combinations must form from left to right starting on reel one, and any hit activates a cascade feature.

The paytable leans heavily into wolves, with four wolf symbols acting as the premium icons, paying 4 to 15 times your stake for six of a kind. Lower-value symbols are Native American-themed items—vases, axes, headdresses, drums, masks, and a tepee—paying up to 1.5 times the stake for a six-symbol win. The last symbol to note before the bonus details is the wild, which can substitute for any paying symbol to help complete winning ways.

Howling Wolves Megaways: Slot Features

Cascades are easily the most common mechanic you’ll see in Howling Wolves Megaways, but the game also includes four random modifiers that can appear during the base game, and they show up more regularly once free spins are underway.

Cascades

With this feature, winning symbols are removed, letting the remaining icons drop down to fill the empty spaces. This can lead to extra payouts, and the cascade sequence keeps going until no further winning combinations land.

Random Modifiers

During either the base game or the bonus round, one of these 4 modifiers can randomly activate:

• Howling Wilds – a random number of wilds are placed on the reels.
• Alpha Pack Spin – all wolf symbols in view are transformed into the highest value wolf symbol.
• Wolf Pack Multipliers – a win multiplier of x3, x4, or x5 is added to the current spin and is applied to any wins. Following cascades increase the multiplier by +1.
• Max Megaways – rams 7 symbols onto each reel to produce the max 117,649 ways to win.

Free Spins

Hitting at least 4 scatter symbols in the base game grants 8 free spins, with 2 extra spins added for every scatter beyond four, up to a maximum of 30. During free spins, one advantage is that random modifiers effectively trigger more often than in the base game. It’s worth squeezing as much as you can from the spins you earn, because scatters are removed from the reels for the bonus game.

Howling Wolves Megaways: Slot Verdict

Either Booming Games has a bigger strategy here that’s not immediately obvious, or choosing to recycle a game with limited upside was simply a letdown. There are still some good points: the visuals are appealing, wolf-themed slots generally have broad player appeal, the animations are fine, and the feature set is respectable. That said, those features feel held back, as if they were never allowed to fully deliver the impact they promise.

Most of what you get here mirrors the original Howling Wolves slot, with Max Megaways being the notable extra, so don’t go in expecting a dramatically fresh experience. A key change is that free spins can no longer be retriggered, and it’s also a shame that the multipliers earned through the Wolf Pack Multiplier feature reset on the next spin. Letting multipliers carry over and build, as many Megaways slots do, could have provided a much-needed boost.

In its current form, Howling Wolves Megaways can pay up to 2,168x your bet, which is unusually modest for a Megaways title. In the end, the limited top-end potential and features that don’t quite reach their full strength leave Howling Wolves Megaways feeling restrained for much of the time.