Heist Guys 2 lands: ELK's walking wilds are back on the pier

ELK Studios' sequel is live, and the walking Wild's sheriff-star multiplier is doing exactly what the trailer promised — most of the time.

ELK Studios' sequel to Heist Guys landed on the pier this week, and the desk sent someone down to have a look before writing anything about it. The short version: the walking Wild is back, the X-iter menu is bigger, and the sheriff-star multiplier climbs the way the marketing said it would — in the sessions where it climbs at all. Here is what actually changed, and what the numbers say about the 10,000x figure on the box.

What the X-iter menu actually buys you

The X-iter panel lets you pay a fixed multiple of your stake to start the round further along than a standard spin. ELK has stacked three tiers this time instead of two: a cheap entry that adds extra Wilds to the base game, a mid-tier that starts you with one sheriff star already active, and the full bonus buy that drops you straight into free spins. Each tier has its own printed cost and its own RTP line in the paytable, and they are not identical to the base game's number.

None of the three tiers change the maths in your favour. They change where in the round you start, not what the round is worth on average. A cheaper entry costs less and gets you less; the full buy costs more and gets you the feature outright. It is a timing choice, not a value one, and the paytable says so if you read past the headline percentage.

The sheriff-star ladder, plainly

Each Wild that lands during free spins carries a sheriff star, and every time that Wild walks into a new position, its star ticks the multiplier up one notch on a fixed ladder — x2, x4, x8, and so on. The ladder is shared: once a Wild reaches a rung, later Wilds keep building from there rather than starting over. That is the mechanic doing the actual work in this game, more than the reel set underneath it.

In the sessions we logged, the ladder mostly stalled in single figures. It reached a proper x64 exactly once across a run of buys, which is the kind of result the 10,000x number on the box is built from — a rare tail, not a typical outcome. Treat any screenshot of a big multiplier as a real but uncommon result, the same as you would with any other slot's top prize.

Whether the ceiling is worth chasing

A 10,000x ceiling needs a lot of ordinary rounds paying very little to balance the maths, and Heist Guys 2 is no exception — the base game plays drier than the trailer suggests. That is not a flaw; it is how a high multiplier ceiling has to work if the return to player is going to add up to a sensible figure over millions of spins.

Our note is the same one we give on every buy-feature title: the ceiling is real, but it is the exception, not the plan. Budget the buy as its own line item, expect the ladder to stop low most nights, and treat a big result as a bonus rather than the point of playing. Pokies are entertainment for players 18 and over — if a session stops feeling like that, the Gambling Helpline NZ is free on 0800 654 655.