Blood Suckers Megaways review
The game builds on a classic vampire theme, and Red Tiger, under NetEnt licence, turned it into a Megaways slot with six reels of changing height and free spins that begin with opening coffins. A high return here sits alongside very uneven payouts.
A foggy street, a vampire and two brides
The official banner shows a foggy night street, candelabra, a vampire in a black cape in the centre, a blonde woman on the left and a bride on the right. The picture is gloomy but free of gore, closer to old horror films. The studio’s description adds bats and a feeling of creeping dread: the hunt is on, and do you dare face the undead.
The kinship with the classic Blood Suckers from NetEnt shows in the name and the theme. But this version plays quite differently: instead of five reels and ten lines there are six reels of changing height and a coffin picker before the bonus.
The 6×7 grid and the 117,649 formula
There are six reels, and each can hold from two to seven symbols at once. The upper limit comes from multiplication: 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 x 7 = 117,649, and the studio lists exactly this figure as the maximum number of ways. A combination pays for identical symbols on adjacent reels from left to right, and its payout is multiplied by the number of paths, meaning how many such symbols stand on each reel of the chain.
The height distribution is not disclosed, so a full grid with the maximum of ways is more a theoretical border than a working figure. The stake is one, from 0.10 to 50, and does not depend on reel height in the current spin: a spin with full sevens and a couple of Wilds can pay dozens of times more than a spin with short reels, although both cost the same.
From 900x to 20,521x: how the Blood Suckers family grew
The original NetEnt game came out in 2009 and became one of the best-known slots with a high RTP: the studio puts it at 98%, with a modest cap. The 2017 sequel, Blood Suckers 2, raised the maximum a little and lowered the RTP. The Megaways version went the other way from caution: the return barely suffered, and the cap grew several times over.
Blood Suckers — Studio: NetEnt; Year: 2009; RTP: 98%; Max win: 900x; Volatility: low.
Blood Suckers 2 — Studio: NetEnt; Year: 2017; RTP: 96.94%; Max win: 1,200x; Volatility: low.
Blood Suckers Megaways — Studio: Red Tiger; Year: 2023; RTP: 97.66%; Max win: 20,521x; Volatility: “Extreme” on the studio scale.
The cap is about 23 times the original and almost 17 times the second part. A jump like that is usually paid for in character: where long calm runs of small returns used to dominate, you now wait for a rare bonus with a lucky set of coffins.
Random Wild and Super Wild: how paths are counted
A Random Wild can land on reels two to five and replaces all paying symbols. The studio adds that a Wild counts as whichever symbol makes the longest winning combination. The Super Wild is more interesting: up to two per spin, also on reels 2-5, and each fills an entire reel. It carries a ways multiplier of up to 7x, which the studio explains as the number of symbols the Super Wild counts as in the ways calculation.
For instance, with three matching symbols on reel one, two on reel four, and a Super Wild with a 7x multiplier on each of reels two and three, a four-reel chain has 3 x 7 x 7 x 2 = 294 paths. Without multipliers on the same reels at four symbols high it would be 3 x 4 x 4 x 2 = 96; real multipliers, of course, come in various sizes.
Chain Reaction and the Win Multiplier
The studio calls its cascades Chain Reaction. Symbols that formed a win disappear, new ones drop into the free space, and if another combination forms with them, it pays too. Until the chain breaks, there is no need to spin again.
Now and then a Win Multiplier fires during a spin, and all wins of that spin are multiplied by 2x, 3x or 5x. It cannot trigger on a spin without a win and resets at the start of the next one, so it is not a growing counter but a one-off top-up for a specific chain. It lands best on a long chain of cascades, because the sum of all the spin’s wins is multiplied, not just one combination. Together with a Super Wild, where the number of paths has already grown many times over, a 5x gives the biggest boost in the base game.
The Bonus Scatter and three scatters at the door
Three or more scatters start 5 free spins. A separate Bonus Scatter feature in the base game drops 2, 3 or 4 scatters onto the reels at once, which is enough to start the bonus without further conditions. Up to five scatters can land in one spin.
Each scatter gives one pick in the picker at the start of free spins. The minimum is three picks and the maximum five, and here the bet is on the number, not on a “right” coffin.
Ten coffins: the make-up and a blind pick
Before free spins a picker of ten closed coffins opens. A chosen coffin “slays the vampire” inside and switches on a random feature for the length of free spins. The studio discloses the make-up: two coffins with Random Wilds, two with Super Wild, three with bonus spins (1, 2 or 3 added to the initial five) and three with multipliers of 2x, 3x and 5x.
All coffins look identical, and the studio gives no hints about what lies inside, so the player’s choice comes down to a random poke and the position of a coffin on screen changes nothing. Three and five picks differ not in player skill but only in the number of attempts at the same set of ten, and that number is set by the scatters at entry or by the purchase price.
Three, four or five picks: odds and purchase price
The fang button opens the purchase menu. The Feature Coffin costs 10x the bet, and the studio does not say what exactly it does. The other bonus buy options sell picks: free spins with three guaranteed picks cost 150x, with four 500x and with five 1,000x, and the purchase variants come without an RTP figure. The odds in the table are derived from the published make-up: coffins are picked without replacement, so the probabilities can be computed exactly (a hypergeometric distribution), although the studio itself does not publish them.
3 — Purchase price: 150x; At least one Super Wild: 53.3%; At least one Random Wilds: 53.3%; A Wild of either kind: 83.3%; Wild and multiplier together: 55.0%; No multiplier at all: 29.2%; Average spins: 6.8.
4 — Purchase price: 500x; At least one Super Wild: 66.7%; At least one Random Wilds: 66.7%; A Wild of either kind: 92.9%; Wild and multiplier together: 76.2%; No multiplier at all: 16.7%; Average spins: 7.4.
5 — Purchase price: 1,000x; At least one Super Wild: 77.8%; At least one Random Wilds: 77.8%; A Wild of either kind: 97.6%; Wild and multiplier together: 89.3%; No multiplier at all: 8.3%; Average spins: 8.0.
With three picks no Wild of any kind turns up in about one bonus in six, and with five picks that happens a little more often than one time in forty. The average length grows more slowly: a pick has a 30% chance of a spin coffin, which adds 2 spins on average, so each extra pick adds about 0.6 of a spin. Spin coffins, like multiplier coffins, number three, so a bonus of exactly five free spins comes with the same probability as a bonus with no multiplier. A fully empty bonus, with no Wild coffins and no multipliers, is possible only with three picks, and even then at about 0.8%: it takes all three spin coffins in a row. With four or five picks something useful always turns up.
A Wild together with a multiplier brings the biggest payouts, and that column shows the fifth pick is worth more for hunting rare results than for smoothing the game. When buying, each point of probability gets dearer: the fourth pick lifts the chance of a Super Wild by 13.4 points for 350 extra bets, and the fifth adds another 11.1 points for 500. That is the main argument against the top purchase, all the more since the probability of reaching the cap is not published.
What “Extreme” means on the studio’s volatility scale
Red Tiger publishes the volatility index as a number and places it in a category. Values below 9.9 count as “Medium”, 9.9 to 17.3 as “High”, 17.3 to 27.3 as “Extreme” and above 27.3 as “Insane”. Blood Suckers Megaways has an index of 24.46, so the slot sits in the upper part of “Extreme”, not far from the “Insane” border.
The game pays irregularly. The 23.78% hit frequency is quite ordinary, about every fourth spin, but only the occurrence of a payout is counted, not its size, and a win can still return less than the stake. Divide the RTP by the hit frequency and you get roughly 4.1 bets per winning spin, bonuses included. Small returns of a tenth of a bet and rare large wins pull that average in different directions, so it says more about how uneven the payouts are than about a typical win: the main contribution to the RTP comes from rare big chains and bonuses.
A 97.66% RTP and Red Tiger’s Megaways neighbours
Red Tiger’s median sits at about 95.75%, and this slot beats it by 1.91 points, so its expected loss over the long run is nearly half as large; over one evening, though, that average decides little. By RTP the game is fourth among the studio’s slots: ahead of it are only Revolvero at 98.11%, Mystery Reels Megaways at 98.06% and Well of Wilds Megaways at 97.71%. Just behind, a hundredth of a percent lower, comes Pirates’ Plenty Megaways at 97.65%, with half the cap.
Among the studio’s Megaways slots, only this one pairs an RTP above 97.5% with a cap above 20,000x. Mystery Reels Megaways (2019) caps at 10,346x, Pirates’ Plenty Megaways (2021) at 10,497x and Piggy Riches Megaways (2020) at 10,000x with a 95.71% RTP, while Gonzo’s Quest Megaways (2020) has a slightly higher cap of 20,972x but an RTP almost two points lower, 95.77%. The publisher’s other games are listed on the Red Tiger page.
