Baron Bloodmore

Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle: Slot Overview

Players, take a walk on the undead side in Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle, a vampire-themed slot from veteran Swedish developer Thunderkick. The studio has stepped things up for the Baron, where you'll come across a couple of classic features which have been expanded to increase their effects as well as produce a higher than normal max win figure we are used to seeing from this developer.

With a look suggestive of their Beat the Beast range, you know you are playing a Thunderkick game when Baron Bloodmore fires up. That's not a bad thing either because their graphics typically have a strong, clear quality, particularly symbols distinctive of this studio. For this game, players find themselves deep within Crimson Castle, in a church-like space bathed in an eerie purple light, while just below the 5-reel, 3-row grid Baron Bloodmore snoozes in his coffin, biding his time till the sun goes down.

Players can try to snatch some loot during daylight hours on any device, picking bets that range from 10 p/c to $/€100 per spin. For players who enjoy some hardcore gaming, volatility is high, as is potential, while RTP comes in one setting only, which is 96.15%. Like the Beat the Beast range, Baron Bloodmore is pretty straightforward, and much of the gameplay is quite traditional. For starters, 25 fixed paylines are provided to land winning combinations of 3 to 5 of a kind on to collect coins. In total, 8 pay symbols are on hand to work with, from 4 spikey J-A card tiles to ravens, wolves, gargoyles, and Baron Bloodmore himself brooding at the top. Value-wise, premium symbols generate wins of 10 to 30 times the stake for five of a kind.

Moreover, 3 vampiric sisters appear on the wild symbols, though each one has the same capabilities. Wilds substitute for pay symbols to complete winning lines, and if they land in combinations of their own, they have the same value as Baron Bloodmore.

Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle: Slot Features

On the surface, mystery symbols, free spins, plus a hold-&-win feature might not sound cutting edge, but Thunderkick has added a few original touches to neaten them up and make them rather original.

What's different about mystery symbols here is they are massive in size. They appear either partially or fully in view on the middle three reels in 3x3 size. Massive mystery symbols turn up completely at random during the base game and on every spin in the free spins bonus round. When it hits, this oversized symbol randomly changes into a pay symbol or a wild.

Winged skull symbols are the scatters, and 3, 4, or 5 in view award 10, 15, or 20 free spins (which cannot be retriggered). As mentioned above, the main benefit here is that massive mystery symbols land on every spin.

Some games might have stopped there, but Baron Bloodmore's central feature is its Crimson Cash Bonus Game. Unlocking it occurs when 3 Cash bonus symbols land on 3 different reels, this is the tile with the castle silhouetted against the moon. When the Crimson Cash Bonus game is active, the normal reels are replaced with a different set which only contain special symbols, bet multiplier symbols (starting at x1 to x50) or empty spaces. Once in, 3 spins start the round, and every time a symbol lands, it locks in place plus resets the counter back to 3. At the end of the bonus round, the values of all bet multipliers are added together before being paid out.

It might sound pretty standard so far, yet Thunderkick has included a few extras to mix things up during this bonus round. One is a pattern collection feature. In the bonus game, you'll see a pattern of 5 illuminated symbol positions. When these positions are filled, the bet multiplier of the illuminated symbols is added together. The total amount is added to the middle symbols and then doubled. All affected symbols, except the middle position, are then removed, and a new pattern is generated.

Two more symbols round off the bonus round. One is the spawn symbol which adds its own multiplier to all other symbols on the reels. Lastly, when copy Symbols land, the value of all other symbols in view is added to itself.

Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle: Slot Verdict

After the Crystal Quest series sort of just faded away amidst a minimum of fanfare, the Thunderkick team must've felt like launching in a completely different direction. Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle certainly makes a fresh change, odd given the undead nature of its subject matter. There are plenty of positive aspects about Baron Bloodmore that should appeal to players with a soft spot for classic features and straightforward base game rules. The slot is by no means a generic hold-&-spin special though. In Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle, Thunderkick takes old school features and expands them to create something which displays a healthy dose of originality.

Proving that small changes can make mighty differences, the tweaks made to the Crimson Cash Bonus Game are subtle yet significant. The pattern system has been put to good use in slots like Play'n GO's Gemix 2, and it works like a charm here as well. The round is nowhere near as sophisticated or gung ho as something like Money Train 2, though potentially it compares quite favourably. At 25,000x the bet, Baron Bloodmore and the Crimson Castle produces some of the biggest wins possible in a Thunderkick game, adding to the undead allure. Free spin rounds aren't quite as spectacular, yet having Massive Mystery Symbols land on every free spin means each one produces a little thrill as you wait to see what goodies will line up.

To sum up, Thunderkick has produced a solid vampire-themed game for hardcore gamblers to sink their teeth into - sorry, pun intended. It does things seen elsewhere, but not usually to this extreme, thereby creating some exciting high potential gaming.