Wild Toro 2 slot: what ELK Studios changed in the sequel

The first Wild Toro arrived in 2016 and became one of the titles ELK Studios is recognised for. The sequel came out in 2021, after the studio had spent several years building the sort of slot where the playing area itself changes shape during a feature. That experience is visible in Wild Toro 2 straight away: the grid is not a fixed frame with a bonus bolted on, it is a frame that grows while the feature runs, and the characters are what make it grow.

The practical consequence for anyone comparing the two is that nothing carries over unchanged except the cast. The original ran on five reels and four rows with 178 connecting ways and asked for three Matadors before its respin feature would start. Wild Toro 2 starts at five rows, needs a single Matador, and can finish a respin sequence on a grid two rows taller than the one it began on. Reviews that have played both describe the respins as arriving noticeably more often, which is the same change seen from the other end.

Toro the bull and the matadors who keep failing to deal with him are still the whole story, and the setting is still a Spanish town. What changed is the angle: where the original looked down on the scene, the sequel looks up past market stalls and shop fronts to buildings and a fortress on the skyline, with the streets conspicuously empty of people. British reviews of the game spend an unusual amount of space on the soundtrack, which is flamenco rather than the handful of idle sounds the first game shipped with: trumpets, guitar, hand claps and singing, rising as a respin sequence extends.

The symbol set was redrawn as well. There are eight paying symbols: four ribboned card royals from jack to ace at the bottom, then silver coins, gold coins, a knifed orange and a flower as the four better ones, with the flower paying most. Wins are made by connection rather than by lines, so three or more matching symbols touching each other pay, including where they only touch at a corner. One catalogue files the theme under a different country from everyone else, which is a cataloguing slip rather than a fact about the game, and is mentioned here only so that nobody has to wonder which is right.

The studio's own description of Wild Toro 2 is short enough to quote in full in substance: a five reel, five row charging slot with expanding reels, walking Wilds, respins and progressive multipliers. Unpacked, that means a Matador landing in view adds a row of symbols and then starts walking one reel to the left per respin until it drops off the edge. There are three kinds. The silver one is a walking Wild. The gold one is a walking Wild carrying a multiplier that rises by one with every step it takes. The black one triggers the expansion and the respins like the others but blocks instead of substituting, so it cannot complete a win by itself.

Toro walks too, and when the bull and a matador are in view at the same time the named feature starts. The reason this matters more in the sequel than in the original is the multiplier: when Toro knocks a Golden Matador off the reels he takes its multiplier with him and keeps growing it, and a second bull arriving on a later respin inherits whatever the first one has reached. That is the whole engine of the game's upper range, and it has a page of its own here rather than a paragraph, because the order the pieces happen in is the part most summaries get wrong.

ELK Studios describes the shape of the game on its product page and does not print a return figure there. Everything numeric below therefore comes from reviews and catalogues, and is written as theirs. Most of them list 95 per cent for Wild Toro 2, against 96.4 per cent for the original, and several say outright that the drop is the one thing they hold against the sequel. One well-known catalogue instead lists 96.58 per cent, which no other source we have seen repeats; the gap is too wide to average away, so this site reports the common figure as common and the odd one as odd rather than picking a winner quietly.

What the sequel buys with that is variance and headroom. The original is usually filed as medium volatility with a top payout of about 2,250 times the stake; Wild Toro 2 is filed as high, with a ceiling of 10,000 times. Those two numbers are consistent across every source we checked, which is worth saying plainly, because a figure four independent places agree on and a figure one place prints are not the same kind of claim. The figures page sets each one out next to the sort of source that stands behind it.

Most slots from studios of this size ship with a demo build, and Wild Toro 2 is one of them: catalogues and operator lobbies run it with no account and no deposit, and at least one of them states that the demo uses the same return and the same features as the real-money build. That is useful to know because the sequel is a game whose feel depends on how often the respins start, and that is a question nobody can answer for you from a paragraph.

Two honest limits, though. This site hosts no game and opens none, so any page here promising you a free round would be lying, and there is no link below that does. And a free round proves nothing about the cashier you later sign into: the panel inside the real account is where the configured figure for that operator is shown, and it is fresher than any description of the game, this one included.

The studio holds a Gambling Commission licence, so its titles appear at British licensed operators, and a catalogue that tracks availability by market says as much about this one. The X-iter menu is a different matter: a British review of Wild Toro 2 states that the paid entry options are withheld from accounts in the United Kingdom under the regulator's rules. We have not found that contradicted anywhere, and it fits what British players report about feature-buy menus generally, so the menu is described on this site as part of the product rather than as something to plan a session around. The X-iter page lists all five modes and their prices, and says the same thing in more detail.

The rest of the British frame is short. Eighteen is the age, everywhere in the United Kingdom, with no regional variation of the kind some other markets have. The national helpline runs two numbers, one for England and Scotland and a separate one for Wales, and both answer at any hour; they are printed in the footer of every page here rather than hidden behind a link. GAMSTOP is the scheme that blocks one registration across every British-licensed operator at once, and it is worth knowing about before it is needed rather than after.

What the second game does better is not in dispute. The grid is more interesting because it changes shape; the multiplier is more interesting because it travels and then changes owner; the respins arrive on one matador instead of three, so the feature set is actually seen rather than read about. Reviewers who played the original on release and the sequel five years later tend to describe the same thing in the same way: the parts are the same parts, with room to work in and a reason to interact with each other.

What it does worse is also not in dispute. A lower return and higher variance together mean a given budget buys fewer spins before a decision has to be made about whether to continue, and the long flat stretches are flatter here because there is no feature being earned in the background. More than one review says plainly that the return is the one thing it holds against the game, and at least one adds that even with the easier trigger the special symbols can stay away for a hundred spins at a time.

No score appears anywhere on this site, for either game. We have measured nothing: we have read what the studio publishes and what catalogues publish, checked where the two disagree, and written down which is which. A star rating on top of that would be a number with nothing behind it, and this is a subject where a number with nothing behind it is worse than a paragraph that admits as much.