Spartans vs Zombies

Spartans vs Zombies: Slot Overview

Zombies! At times it seems like everything is out to get them. Plants, people, Granny, all are putting up a fight. Maybe if the shambling horde wasn't bent on ending humanity, perhaps it would be different. We digress, so let's come back to the slot at hand, which pits zombies up against one of the Ancient World's greatest warriors - the Spartans. The game in question is Spartans vs Zombies by Stakelogic and comes with two separate bonus rounds, reflecting the two conflicting parties.

An odd match of characters gets an equally odd location for them to battle it out. The base game takes place on the Spartan Planet, a jagged rock environment, with a set of stairs winding their way through the middle of it, depending on how you are viewing the game. Then again, where else could a cohort of Spartan warriors take on an undead horde? It's got to be somewhere tough, desolate, and a little dangerous. They didn't have malls or supermarkets or wherever a zombie infestation might take place back then, after all. It's an odd mix that's hard to know what to make of it at first. Get a good hit, which one of the first free spin rounds during our test session provided, and it might make more sense.

The hit in question took place from a bonus buy, but other ways of tackling the game are by per-spin bets at 20 p/c to $/€100 a pop or by taking advantage of the Super Stake option. The Super Stake doubles the bet whilst increasing the chance of triggering free spins. With a theoretical RTP of 96.24%, Spartans vs Zombies operates on a highly volatile math model.

Other technical aspects include a game board made up of 5 reels, 3 rows and 20 paylines. Winning combinations must land across a payline, starting from the leftmost side of the grid over adjacent reels. When five matching symbols link up like this, players collect payouts of 1.5x-4x the bet for the 10 to A symbols, or 5.5x-15x the bet for the spears, helms, two columned structure symbols, zombies, or Spartans. Critical to the action is the Multipays feature. How it works is that it pays for wins on the first three reels, then pays again if the fourth reel adds to the win, then again if the fifth reel further improves it. Various wild symbols arrive at certain points, too. What they all have in common is they substitute for any normal pay symbol. The regular wild is present on all reels and pays 15x the stake for a five-wild winning line.

Spartans vs Zombies: Slot Features

Spartans vs Zombies has two bonus rounds and several ways of triggering them. One way is by landing three scatter symbols on reels 1, 3, and 5 that trigger either bonus round, depending on whether zombies or Spartans win a battle.

Meters

During the base game, zombie symbols in view are collected by the Zombie Meter, and 3 hearts are also awarded. One heart is lost on each following spin. If the meter is filled, the Zombie Free Spins round are awarded. The meter resets when free spins are triggered or when the hearts run out. The same thing applies to when Spartan symbols are in view, just with a respective Spartan Meter.

Spartan Free Spins

When triggered, 10 free spins are awarded with an x2 win multiplier. Players then get 2 shield picks before the round starts, though, which can reveal free spins or win multiplier increases. In this bonus, there is a chance reels 2, 3, or 4 become fully wild for the current spin. Lastly, each scatter that hits awards an extra free spin.

Zombie Free Spons

In this one, 10 free spins are awarded, with an additional free spin added for each scatter that lands while the feature is active. On each free spin, there is a chance 1-2 Sticky Wild symbols are added to the reels. If2 are, the second Sticky Wild gets a multiplier of x2-x10. Multipliers affect wins they are part of, and when more than one multiplier is used in a win, the values are added.

Buy Feature

Where applicable, players can buy Spartan Free Spins for 100x the bet or Zombie Free Spins for 200x the bet. Otherwise, 150x the bet buys one feature or the other at random.

Spartans vs Zombies: Slot Verdict

A strange group of adversaries have been brought together to fight it out in Spartans vs Zombies, which may or may not be off-putting from the get-go. If you can look past the odd mix, and the so-so graphics, there's a fairly engaging online slot lying in wait beneath it all, ready to be discovered. Whether you'll stick with it or not may depend on how early you get to see Spartans vs Zombies wind up and do something special. To its credit, this it did quite early during testing, making it easier to hang on and see what else there was on offer. If Spartans vs Zombies hadn't delivered big early, it might have been easier to just dismiss it as an oddity; an unusual thought experiment about what might happen if a tide of zombies crashed up on the rocks of a Spartan shield wall.

The early result referred to above occurred during the Zombie Free Spins bonus round, which proved to be the more exciting of the two. Spartan Free Spins were okay but remained a pretty standard serving of free spins with a win multiplier and full reel wilds wedged in to potentially up the ante. Zombie Free Spins, on the other hand, have the benefit of Sticky Wilds and Sticky Wild multipliers. Adding them together when more than one wild multiplier is used in a win rather than multiplying them counterbalances the rather high values they can obtain, but they can still produce shockingly good results when a deluge of them floods the reels. It's the sort of feature which has the ability to dazzle, no matter what the outer wrapper of the game might be. It had been put to good use in other games around this time, too, such as The Wildos, Sweet Rush Megaways, and The Dog House Multihold. What can really make it shine here is the pairing with Multplays, and the mechanic was a lot more impressive here than the last time we saw it in Diamond Staxx Multipays. Sticky wild multipliers are like the slot equivalent of pizza. Can they ever really be all that bad?

The answer to that question may depend on how you feel about the rest of Spartans vs Zombies. Either the zombies attacking ancient warrior angle might be a little far-fetched, or it could be just what the doctor ordered. Of course, the middle ground response could just as easily be ambivalence too. However, those tempted by the proposal shouldn't struggle to extract a decent level of entertainment out of Spartans vs Zombies; it's certainly got the firepower to produce big thrills.