Zombie School Megaways: Slot Overview
As well as bright, cheerful slot themes that do their darndest to make gamblers feel happy while winning and losing, the industry has less happy-go-lucky parts as well. We’re talking about things like mummies, werewolves, evil clowns, vampires, and eldritch horrors that are best left alone to fester in the darker places of the world. The undead is also a popular choice, not just in slots but across pop culture. Just why this is so, makes for an interesting psychological study, but if you’d rather put academics aside to experience some visceral undead thrills while gambling, join us as we flee from mindless brain eaters in Pragmatic Play‘s online slot Zombie School Megaways.
Things like the character symbols would suggest Zombie School Megaways takes place in an Asian school, though with globalisation and the mass movement of people, players are free to keep their minds open on the location. The game has a decayed, grimy quality that suits the theme, with humans displaying a mix of shock, fear and defiance, and understandably so. The indoor base game showdown switches to an outdoors one for free spins, separated by a creepy red cut screen squeezed in the middle. Like most zombie slots, Zombie School Megaways isn’t a disgusting gore fest of entrails and half-eaten brains, but it certainly sits on a queasier edge of the spectrum. For a slot.
Zombie School Megaways gets its shamble going on a 6-reel Megaways powered grid, each reel landing up to 7 symbols. Varying symbols on the grid produce a variety of ways to win, where the ceiling value is 117,649. Winning combinations pay left to right, and winning symbols are removed by the tumble mechanic, causing symbols to drop down and replace them. Tumbles continue to trigger so long as new winning combinations continue to form, and the number of symbols on a reel after tumbling can randomly increase if it had at least one winning symbol. Hiding from the undead in a back cupboard is Zombie School Megaways’ math model, which is highly volatile and has a top RTP of 96.55% when betting 20 c to $/€240. The ante bet can be activated for double the stake, to make it five times more likely to trigger free spins.
Listed on the symbol hierarchy are key cards, lunch boxes, first aid kits, backpacks, three human characters, and three zombie characters. Hitting 6 matching non-character symbols pays 0.5x-0.75x, humans pay 1x-1.5x, and zombies pay 2x-5x the bet. Wilds land on all reels except the leftmost reel, substituting all symbols except scatters.
Zombie School Megaways: Slot Features
Aside from the wilds and the tumbles, there are no other extras in the base game. So, hitting 4, 5, or 6 scatters awards players 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. During the bonus round, each win is multiplied by a number equal to the total number of symbols that exploded in the current tumble. Hopefully, there is a lot of exploding as free spins cannot be retriggered.
Feature Buy
Zombie School Megaways has two options when it comes to buying features. The first is a standard free spins round, triggered by 4 to 6 scatters for 100x the bet, or persistent multiplier free spins, also triggered by 4 to 6 scatters for 500x the bet. What makes the second option more expensive is that the multipliers achieved after every tumble add to a total multiplier which persists throughout the entire feature.
Zombie School Megaways: Slot Verdict
One interesting thing about zombies is how versatile they can be. Not only are they useful for instilling fear, they can also be surprisingly endearing, as Pragmatic Play explored in its earlier undead slot Zombie Carnival. Apart from reanimated corpses, the two games are very different. Zombie School Megaways is a more serious slot that relies on a heavy atmosphere to keep players engaged till free spins trigger, where the more interesting things can occur. Thinking out loud here, is this a game aimed at bonus buy players? Only wondering because the studio has largely kept special features out of the base game, and it has not only put better extras in the bonus round, it’s included super free spins which cannot be organically triggered.
In other words, Zombie School Megaways does that annoying thing where its best parts are stashed behind a not insignificant paywall. Persistent multiplier free spins significantly up the ante by making the win multiplier achieved by exploding symbols persist till the feature ends. It’s a potentially massive leg up, so what a pity it cannot be triggered from the base game or upgraded from a regular free spins round, but can only be bought. One would assume the persistent multiplier free spins scenario might provide the best opportunity for hitting Zombie School Megaways’ 10,000x win cap, which, depending on your max multiplier calculation method, could equate a 500x feature buy into a 20x max win.
Moving away from the numbers, Zombie School Megaways is a passable zombie slot, with gore-spattered theme use, and an interesting cultural angle. It wouldn’t have hurt if there had been something extra in the base game, but the way the number of winning symbols generates a multiplier is a productive feature with solid reusability value in the future, and bonus buyers with relatively deep pockets have things to rejoice about.
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