Pandemic Rising Slot Review
A monkey sits on a ledge above an abandoned city, tail hanging, watching orange haze settle over empty tower blocks. Pandemic Rising spends its whole first act asking you to wait, and that’s the honest shape of it: this is a slot that holds nearly everything back until three bonus symbols land, and trusts the build to be worth the patience.
The virus here is something to collect rather than fear. Pragmatic Play run it on a 5×4 grid with 40 paylines, 96.51% RTP and high volatility, with stakes from 0.20 to 240.00 per spin.
The studio’s darker output, Zombie Carnival and CULT, mines the same territory. The bonus round here is where the outbreak actually spreads.
Base Game & Features
This is a five-reel, four-row slot with 40 fixed paylines. All symbols pay left to right on adjacent reels starting from the leftmost reel, and only the highest win per line counts. It’s a conventional enough frame for what lives inside it.
The cast runs from survivors to scientists, and the paytable below shows what each symbol returns as a multiple of stake for three, four and five of a kind:
- Red hood / gas mask man: 1.5x, 5x, 20x
- Blue-haired woman: 1.25x, 2.375x, 12.5x
- Man with sunglasses and rifle: 0.75x, 2x, 7.5x
- Soldier woman: 0.5x, 1.25x, 5x
- Scientist: 0.35x, 0.75x, 3.75x
- Biohazard monkey: 0.15x, 0.5x, 2.5x
- A, K: 0.15x, 0.3x, 1.5x
- Q: 0.15x, 0.25x, 1x
- J: 0.1x, 0.15x, 1x
- 10: 0.1x, 0.25x, 1x
Two shapes in those numbers matter. The gap between the top symbol and everything beneath it is wide, so the masked man is the one worth watching for. And the drop from the scientist down to the royals is steep enough that the card symbols are fillers, not payers.
Identical symbols land in stacks too, filling a full reel with the same survivor or royal at times. A stacked reel in the right position can put several winning lines on the board at once, and the payline grid runs to 40 numbered lines, so those stacked hits are how the bigger base-game moments form without any help.
The WILD appears on reels two, three and four, and substitutes for everything except the BONUS and VIRUS symbols. Whenever it hits, it carries a random multiplier of x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6, x8 or x10 that applies to all wins passing through it.
Where more than one WILD forms part of the same winning combination, their multipliers add together rather than multiply. Two wilds at x5 and x8 in one line pay that win at x13. Because the wild only occupies the middle three reels, it can’t start a line on its own – it finishes them, and it upgrades them.
Between the stacks and the multiplier wilds, the base game has more going on than a straight payline grinder, even before the feature lands. The wild doing the heavy lifting is worth holding in mind, because everything the bonus round adds is built on top of it.
Ante Bet and Super Spin
Two optional bet modes sit alongside the standard stake. The Ante Bet bumps the stake to an 80x multiplier, and with it the natural odds of the feature triggering improve to roughly ten times the base rate.
The Super Spin, at a 200x multiplier, guarantees at least one WILD lands in a random position with a random multiplier on every spin. It’s the dearer of the two modes by some distance, and it buys wilds rather than feature odds, so the two options genuinely differ in what they’re for.
Neither mode changes anything about the round you eventually reach. The Ante Bet just gets you there sooner, and the Super Spin keeps the middle reels hot while you wait. Players who want certainty can skip both and go straight to the buy menu.
Pandemic Rising Free Spins & Bonus Features
Hit three BONUS symbols on reels one, three and five and you win eight free spins. Two things change immediately. Every WILD that lands stays on the screen until the round ends, and a general multiplier comes into play across all wins, starting at 1x.
Every win in the round passes through two multipliers on its way to the balance: whatever sticky wilds sit in the winning line, and the general multiplier on the meter. A round that goes nowhere looks like eight spins at 1x with the odd wild. A round that catches looks very different.
The VIRUS Symbol and the Multiplier Ladder
The VIRUS symbol appears only during free spins, and collecting it is how the round builds. A meter tracks your progress through the following multipliers:
- 1x (starting multiplier)
- 2x
- 3x
- 4x
- 5x
- 7x
- 10x
- 20x
- 50x
- 100x
Every third VIRUS symbol collected moves the general multiplier to the next step and awards one additional free spin. Reaching 100x means climbing nine steps, which takes 27 VIRUS symbols in total. A VIRUS is collected even when it lands underneath a WILD, so nothing is wasted.
The spacing of the ladder is where the design shows. The first three steps come cheap at three viruses each, the middle run from 5x to 10x, and the last two jumps – 50x and 100x – reward nine consecutive collections apiece. The extra spins arrive exactly when the meter moves, so a collecting round keeps extending itself.
Special reels are in play during the round, which changes what can appear. The whole thing compounds: sticky wilds with individual multipliers up to x10, all feeding wins through a general multiplier that can reach 100x, and the wilds that landed in the first eight spins are still there when the meter does.
Bonus Buy
Two purchase options are available from the base game:
- Buy Free Spins: 100x total bet, instantly triggers the standard free spins round
- Buy Super Free Spins: 500x total bet, triggers the round with two WILD symbols guaranteed on screen in random positions with random multipliers from the first spin
Both buys start the same round, with the same meter and the same ladder. The only difference is the opening wilds, so the 500x option is a bet that two sticky multipliers early will do more work than four hundred extra stakes’ worth of attempts at the standard version.
Our Honest Verdict
Overall Rating: 7.7/10
You spend most of Pandemic Rising waiting, and the game is upfront about that. Somebody chooses it for one reason: the round where the wilds stick and the meter climbs. Between waits there’s a gorgeous dusk city to look at, and a monkey who’s clearly seen it all before.
That round earns the wait. It’s the rare feature where every extra spin genuinely changes what came before it, because the wilds you already landed keep working while the multiplier underneath them grows. The weakness is everything around it: the base game is a payline grind the theme dresses up but can’t disguise, and the impatience is priced steeply at 500x for the super buy.
It’s for players who like a long build and a round that ends far from where it started. Anyone who wants the spinning itself to carry the fun will drift off before the meter does. For the patient, the outbreak is worth catching.
Pandemic Rising FAQs
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What is the RTP of Pandemic Rising?
The RTP is 96.51%, which sits just above the typical industry average. -
How do you trigger free spins in Pandemic Rising?
Land the BONUS symbol on the first, third and fifth reel at the same time to start the round with eight free spins. -
What does the VIRUS symbol do in Pandemic Rising?
It appears only during free spins. Every third VIRUS collected advances the general multiplier to the next step on a ladder running from 1x up to 100x, and awards one extra free spin. -
Can you buy the bonus in Pandemic Rising?
Yes. Buy Free Spins costs 100x your total bet and Buy Super Free Spins costs 500x, with the latter guaranteeing two multiplier wilds on screen from the first spin. -
What does the Ante Bet do in Pandemic Rising?
It increases the stake to an 80x multiplier, making the natural chance of the feature triggering roughly ten times better. -
Is Pandemic Rising high volatility?
Yes, it’s a high volatility slot, so wins tend to be less frequent and larger when they arrive. -
What are the minimum and maximum stakes in Pandemic Rising?
Stakes run from 0.20 to 240.00 per spin, with the Ante Bet and Super Spin modes priced at 80x and 200x multipliers respectively. -
Who makes Pandemic Rising?
Pragmatic Play, on a 5×4 grid with 40 paylines.
