Day 34 - Last Survivor - Slot Review

On day 34, after a winning session yesterday, I decided to take on Last Survivor by Blackout Studios, a post-apocalyptic slot with gas masks, mutants, nukes and a can of beans. It comes from a new studio running under Engine.io RGS, and it’s one of the studio’s early releases. It’s a 5x4 grid game with 20 fixed paylines, a 96.50% RTP in every mode and a 30,000x max multiplier potential.

Wins pay from left to right starting on reel 1, with 3 or more of a kind on a payline. The top paying symbol is the Mutant, followed by the Pistol, the Medkit, the Beans and the A, K, Q and J.

The special symbols are where the game gets interesting. The Gas Mask is the Wild, and it carries a multiplier. It substitutes for everything except the Nuke, the Ammo and the Baton, and a line made of masks alone pays as the Mutant. The twist is that the reels never deal a mask. They’re made by the Ammo and Baton symbols, which pay nothing themselves:

Ammo: the Survivor fires 1 to 5 shots, and every shot turns a symbol into a 1x mask. Baton: the Survivor throws his bat at a symbol, which turns into a 1x mask, and the symbols in the bat’s path can turn too. The Survivor can also shoot or throw on his own in the base game.

Masks that touch each other whack each other and add their multipliers, and masks stacked on one reel merge and add up. When a win goes through several masks, it uses the biggest multiplier. The exception is the Hidden Bonus, where the multipliers multiply each other.

The Nuke is the Bonus symbol and pays nothing on its own. 3 Nukes open the Bonus with 8 free spins, 4 open the Super Bonus with 10, and 5 open the Hidden Bonus with 12. If you have 2 Nukes on reels 1 to 4, the Not Dead Yet feature can respin reel 5 to look for the third. During free spins, every Nuke adds 1 spin, and 3 or more on one spin add 5 spins in the Super and Hidden Bonus, with no limit.

Bonus: Ammo and Baton land far more often than in the base game, but the masks stay for only one spin. Super Bonus: every mask sticks, so they build up as the spins go on. Hidden Bonus: masks stick and the multipliers on a winning line multiply each other. That’s where the max win lives.

The plan for winning is to get as many masks on the grid as you can and make them touch each other. The real money is in the Super Bonus and the Hidden Bonus, where the masks are sticky.

During my 1000 spins, I triggered 5 regular bonuses with 3 Nukes in the first 500 spins, and none of them paid anything decent, because the masks don’t stick and disappear after one spin. The last 500 spins were almost all dead spins, and nothing fun happened in the game.

Here’s the key problem for me: the game pays very little attention to the base game, and all the action is hidden in the bonus. The base game never gives you a near miss moment, so you never get a feel for what the Super Bonus or the Hidden Bonus could do. You just sit through dead spins waiting for a Nuke.

Losing is part of the game but a game should be able to tell its story and show its core mechanics to the player in a 1000 spins session.

The studio is high on the top wager lists on Engine.io, so I’ll give a newer release from them a try in the coming sessions.

So is Last Survivor 1000 Spins APPROVED? NO.