Dead or Alive Slot Review

As with many other slot games, Dead or Alive has two types of symbols across its reels. The more common of the two are the playing card symbols, starting at 9 and going to Ace. Since they appear more frequently, they are also worth less than the second type of symbols, which are themed symbols. In Dead or Alive, themed symbols take the form of iconic cowboy items, including a holster, a pair of boots with spurs, and a Sheriff’s badge.

Dead or Alive also features two symbols with unique properties.

The wanted poster is the Wild symbol, and can substitute for any other symbol on a payline, with the exception of Scatter symbols. During free spins, the Wild symbol has a unique function which we’ll explain in the section below.

The revolver is the Scatter symbol, and if you can manage to spin three of them across any of the reels, you activate the game’s bonus feature of 12 free spins, where all wins are doubled. Despite being increasingly unlikely, most other slot games allow you to chain free spins so long as you keep fulfilling their conditions, but in Dead or Alive you can only re-trigger them once. While this hard cap may sound discouraging, it absolutely makes sense in the context of how the game approaches free spins.

Dead or Alive is an incredibly designed slot game, the culmination of a bunch of small details working together to add up to a great experience. The ambient sounds of creaking wood, dogs barking, and thunder in the distance create a wonderful sense of atmosphere, and there is a lot of personality in the animations, like how the payline tags will shake when you mouse over them, or how the windmill in the background will start and stop moving. The Wild and Scatter symbols are beautifully animated, and while it is a bit disappointing that none of the other themed symbols are, they’re all objects that wouldn’t typically be any way.

What’s particularly remarkable is that Dead or Alive was originally released in 2009, and it’s so full of polish and care that you would believe it’s much newer than that. All pokies are fun on some level, but Dead or Alive goes to show that there’s a huge difference in the details.