Blood Suckers Megaways

Few slots have had such longevity as NetEnt's first Blood Suckers. Since it was launched in 2013 it has been an almost constant feature on most casinos' lists of popular games. The Megaways version is a good attempt to take it into the modern era and give the series another 10 years of immortality.

What made the first slot so popular was the high payback rate of 98 percent. It's almost matched here in the Megaways version, which clocks in at 97.66%. That's pretty damn high, but be aware that there is the possibility for operators to use a lower setting. It should also be noted that if it is linked to Red Tiger's Daily Drop jackpot network, the payback is lowered further.

Unlike Blood Suckers II, the Megaways version is much more like the original. The symbols are the same as in the first game, but in significantly higher resolution and with better animations. The sound and graphics is of high quality while still being true to the original. In terms of game mechanics, this is a modern slot that offers a lot of special features. All functions trigger without regard to what happens on the board, which is a slightly lazy solution.

That said, the bonus round is a lot of fun and can result in some awesome feature combinations. A clearly worthy sequel, but not quite as memorable as the first game.

Megaways is where each reel (usually, and here, 6) can contain between 2-7 symbols, this is randomized before each new game round and means 117,649 potential ways to win if things go well. In most versions, and even here, winning combinations are also destroyed, and new symbols fill in from above.

The game relies entirely on randomly activated features rather than special symbols. It's a bit of a lazy solution, we might feel, but it works well. These random features can also be found in the bonus game and transferred into the free spins round. In Blood Suckers Megaways Red Tiger has combined the bonus games from the first game; drive a stake through vampires but instead of coin wins we find free spins and special features for the free spins round, which follow.

This is a highly volatile story with a simulated maximum win of 20521.9x your bet. Several bonus modes can be purchased, resulting in an increased RTP of 97.71%.

It's not clear from the game rules how likely it is that a random feature will be activated, but it feels like it happens quite frequently. They are:

• Random Wilds: On all reels except the first, up to 10 wilds (minimum 2) can be placed.
• Super Wilds: On all reels except the first, one or two whole reels can become wilds with a multiplier up to 7x.
• Bonus symbols: 2, 3 or 4 scatter symbols are placed randomly.
• Win Multiplier: 2x, 3x or 5x applied to the round's win, will also guarantee a win.

Three scatter symbols give 5 free spins and take us to a bonus game, similar to the one used in the first Blood Suckers. It's all about opening chests and killing vampires. In the first game this resulted in coin wins, but here the bonus game lays the groundwork for the upcoming free spins round. We can find extra spins and the features that will be guaranteed on each spin.

There are 10 chests, and you get one pick per scatter that activated the bonus round, a minimum of 3 but a maximum of 5.

The chests contain the same features as in the base game (but with slightly smaller values) and will be active during every spin. Guaranteed Super Wilds are very nice to have around!

Don't despair if you don't find any good features, all special features can still be activated randomly during free spins.

Multipliers collected during free spins are carried over to the next round but can never exceed 10x.