The Bandit and the Baron

Theme and Design

Help The Bandit Unlock The Vault In This Classic Western

The Bandit and the Baron feels like a simple story – our female Bandit is a gunslinger who spins her pistol as she drops on the reels and is here to rob the imposing Baron whose bank vault you are looking to break into through the bonus round. It’s a really simple premise, playing out in a typical Wild West outback town, the kind you’ve seen many times over before in these Western slots.

The backdrop is a red rock mountains dusty streets and saloon bars. The reel set is framed in wood but the fun stuff happens when the action moves into the bank in the bonus round with torches either side of the grid, gold bars to the side of the screen and locked symbols that have to be unpicked.

There is nothing ground-breaking here but its not a bad looking game either and if Wild West slots are your thing, you’ll be at home.

RTP and Variance

The Bandit and the Baron has 3 RTP settings – 96.09%, 94.15% or 92.11%. Ideally you want to be playing the top setting to give yourself the best chance of winning but it is at your casinos discretion which level they choose to run the game at.

I verified the RTP at five popular slot sites for this review. 

• MrQ (Independent) – 96.09% RTP
• Pub Casino (L and L Europe) – 96.09% RTP
• Casumo (independent) – 94.15% RTP
• Barz Casino (White Hat Gaming) – 94.15% RTP
• BacanaPlay (Skill on Net) – 92.11% RTP 

Just two of the casinos in this test group are running the game at the optimum RTP – MrQ and Pub Casino. The others, run at the lower settings. Whilst in reality you wouldn’t feel the difference between 96.09% and 94.15% I would still recommend playing at MrQ or Pub Casino if you want the best chance of a positive return on your bets.

This is also a highly volatile slot with a big win potential but an unpredictable win distribution. You could play for a long time with little or no return before a short blast of big wins drops.

Maximum Win

The top payout in this game is 25,000x. This puts it up there with Just For The Win’s highest max win slots like Western Gold 2 Double Barrel. It’s good potential. If you want more games like this check out our list of the highest max win slots with prizes of 100,000x and more.

Symbols and Paytable

25 Paylines And High Symbol Values For Premiums

The Bandit and the Baron is played on a 5 reel and 5 row reel set with 25 fixed paylines. You’ll need to land 3 or more identical symbols from left to right across a payline to trigger a win.

The paytable has good value in it with 20x for top value premiums and wilds to help you complete paylines.

There are 9 standard pay symbols in total. The low payers are the card suits: diamonds, clubs, hearts and spades. These are valued at from 0.2x for 3 diamonds up to 1.5x for 5 spades. The premiums are the money symbols – silver coins, dollar bills, money bags, gold bars and the open safe. These are valued at from 0.5x for 3 silver coins up to 20x for 5 open safes.

Features and Gameplay

Look Out For Those Bandit Bonus Symbols To Unlock The Big Money Free Spins

The Bandit and the Baron is not loaded with a mind-boggling array of features. The Baron is a regular in the base game but as we shall see, it’s the Bandit who are really looking for.

Expanding Wilds Land Regularly

Let’s start with the Wilds because they appeared frequently in testing, often on more than one reel. The standard wild drops and expands immediately to full reel height displaying the imposing Baron figure. This must have happened every 3 or 4 spins.  Often, more than one will appear and that can be very useful to complete paylines.

Don’t forget that Wilds have their own pay value at 1x, 3x and 20x for 3, 4 or 5 on a line.

Bandit Bonus and Bandit Re-Spins Unlock Bigger Wins

You’ll see the Baron regularly but the Bandit is a little more elusive.

Ultimately you want 3 fully or partially visible Bandit symbols to land on reels 1, 3 and 5. However, if just TWO land, then they lock in place for a Bandit Re-Spin which gives you a chance to land the third, or at least score a win from the same spin.

Once you have those 3 Bandits, then you are entered into the Bandit Bonus round with a different configuration, set inside a Bank Vault.

You start with 3 spins.

Now, of the 25 positions on the reels, 12 are locked and 13 are blank and laid out in a 1,3,5,3,1 formation. And only 3 symbol types are now available.

Cash Symbols are worth 1x, 2x, 3x, 5x, 8x, 10x or 25x. When they land they are allocated their value and remain in place for the whole round. This also sets the counter back to 3.

If a Key Symbol lands in a blank space then one of the locked positions on the grid is opened and a different symbol inside is revealed. This also re-sets the counter to 3.

But best of all, if an Upgrade Symbol lands then it multiplies the values of any cash symbols in a horizontal or vertical line (or both) from the position of the upgrade symbol. The multiplier values are 2x, 3x, 5x or 10x.

The round continues until either you run out of spins, or all positions are filled with coins, or you hit the 25,000x max payout.