Monkeys Go Wild

Theme & presentation

I’ve reviewed enough monkey slots to fill a small zoo, so I sat down with Relax Gaming’s Monkeys Go Wild (2024) expecting the usual jungle-vines-and-bananas routine. To its credit, it doesn’t give me that. Instead we get a slightly deranged laboratory run by a crew of lab monkeys, a humanoid banana, and a rat named Lenny who mostly sleeps. It’s a 5x3 grid, 20 paylines, and the art has a bright, cartoonish, faintly Saturday-morning quality. The characters have personality, the animations are clean, and the soundtrack knows when to shut up. It’s not going to redecorate your memory, but it’s a cut above the phoned-in fruit-and-primate template, and I appreciated that someone in the studio clearly had a bit of fun with the brief.

How it plays

Mechanically it’s conventional at the base level: line up matching symbols left-to-right across 20 fixed lines. Nothing exotic in the reel maths, no cluster nonsense, no expanding grids. What keeps the base game from going stale is Lenny. At random on any spin, the rat can wake up and hand you a bonus, Colossal Symbols, Mystery Reveals, extra Wilds, or a straight ticket into the free spins. It’s the same “random modifier” trick a hundred games use, but it’s dressed up nicely and it means dead spins aren’t quite as dead. There’s also a Mega Bet option and a Feature Buy if you’re impatient, plus an Ante Bet to lean into the trigger odds. Standard toolkit, competently assembled.

The feature

The headline event is the Monkeys Go Wild Bonus, the free spins round. The gimmick here is progression: as spins play out, the monkey symbols convert into Sticky Wilds that stay locked for the remainder of the round, so the board should get gummier and more generous the longer you last. After the fourth spin you’re dropped into a Pick ‘N’ Click mini-game where you pluck bananas to bag either extra spins or a 3x multiplier applied to the final spin. It’s a tidy loop, sticky wilds building while you decide between length and a multiplier bump. That said, I wouldn’t oversell it: this is solid, familiar free-spins design, not a mechanic anyone will be talking about next year.

The numbers, straight

• Max win: 3,000x your stake (confirmed across multiple review sources)
• RTP: 96.07% (marginally above the modern average; the Mega Bet mode runs a touch higher, around 96.28%)
• Volatility: Rated inconsistently — Relax’s own spec-fed listings put it at low-to-medium, while several review sites call it high. Treat the “feast-or-famine” framing with caution; in demo it played closer to a middling-variance game than a true high-vol grinder
• Reels/ways: 5 reels, 3 rows, 20 fixed paylines
• Hit rhythm: No official hit-frequency published; in demo it delivered reasonably regular small hits with the occasional meaningful one, which fits the lower end of the volatility estimates as much as the higher

Verdict

Monkeys Go Wild is a perfectly decent slot that I struggle to feel strongly about either way. The lab theme is charming, the presentation is clean, and the Monkeys Go Wild bonus with its building sticky wilds is a satisfying enough climax. But a 3,000x ceiling is modest by today’s standards, the base game leans heavily on random Lenny bonuses to stay interesting, and nothing here breaks new ground. It’s competent, likeable, and forgettable in roughly equal measure. Worth a few spins for the theme; not one I’ll be reinstalling. And bear in mind that even a “generous” 96.07% still means the RTP sits below 100 by design, well shy of a high-RTP title like Barber Shop Uncut’s 97%.

SlotWhizz rating: 3.0/5. A tidy, well-made mid-tier release with a modest 3,000x cap, and remember that 96.07% RTP is a built-in house edge working against you on every spin.

18+. Demo for fun, not profit. Play-money results are for getting a feel, not forecasting a profit — the house edge decides real sessions. Play responsibly.