The Last Sundown

The Last Sundown: Slot Overview

Ah, the future, no one has a clue what it will be like, but many people are willing to hazard a guess. On the positive side of the prediction spectrum, you've got the sort of Hegelian viewpoint where thesis generates antithesis, leading to a higher, richer synthesis, and the world or Spirit as he saw it ascends to a greater level, in a process of self-realisation. Then there's the opposite side of the argument, that sees a broken future, where a catastrophic event has dragged humanity down to a Mad Max waring clan like level, battling for individual survival in a resource-poor world stripped of civilisation.

Developer Play'n GO explores the latter scenario in their online slot, The Last Sundown. In this game, familial ties are everything as two siblings, Rae and Devin, team up to take down baddies Tuco and Lauro to reclaim resources and hold off The Last Sundown. It sounds like any number of films, Water World starring Kevin Costner being one that sprang to mind. However, The Last Sundown takes place on earth, rather than sea, in a sandy landscape bathed in a burning orange and filled with rickety, broken-down remnants of humanity. It's a bit like when K visits Las Vegas in Blade Runner 2049, a city made uninhabitable after a dirty bomb went off and filled it with radiation. Slot-wise, The Last Sundown initially came across as a mix of xWays Hoarder xSplit (minus the humour) and Infectious 5 xWays – both from Nolimit City.

In the centre of this blasted wasteland lies the game's 5-reel game grid. Most of the time, each reel holds 3 positions, but symbols can split, so ways to win vary from 243 to 7,7776. Wins occur when at least three matching tiles land left to right, adjacently, from the leftmost reel. It's a volatile future too, Play'n GO rates this part of the math model as 8 out of 10, while RTP comes in at 96.2% at the default setting. As always, take a moment to check as the return value can be set lower. Strangely for PnG, bets max out at $/€50 per spin, dropping to 10 p/c at the lower end of the range.

Play'n GO has done away with common slots icons such as suits or royals, using a ragtag bunch of weapons as the five low paying symbols. Higher value tiles are made up of a cyborg doggy, Tuco, Lauro, Rae, and Devin. Premium symbols possess modest values of 1.2 to 5 times the stake, though augmented by the number of ways to win. The final symbol for this segment is the wild, landing anywhere to replace any of the aforementioned pay symbols. Should Wilds form wins of their own, they are worth up to 5x the bet for five of a kind.

The Last Sundown: Slot Features

The Last Sundown's future is not a complicated one at all, with just two bonus features to cover. Splitting Symbols is one of them, showing up in all phases of the game, the other extra is free spins.

Splitting Symbols

On any base game spin, the Splitting Symbol feature may trigger. When activated, one symbol is randomly chosen to be the splitter. When any instance of this symbol type lands on the reels, it is split into two, increasing ways to win.

Free Spins

Hitting 3, 4, or 5 med-kit symbols during the base game awards 8 free spins and a payout of 5x, 10x, or 50x the bet. At the start of free spins, one pay symbol is chosen to be a splitting symbol and one other regular pay symbol is selected for collection. Whenever the chosen collection symbol lands, it fills the collector by one. The more you collect, the more additional symbols can be turned into splitting symbols for the remainder of the feature. You will need to collect 6 for each weapon, 5 for each character, and 4 for the wild. Each time you complete a collection, you get +3 additional free spins as well as the new splitting symbol.

The Last Sundown: Slot Verdict

The Last Sundown follows on from Play'n GO's Shimmering Woods, with several key changes to the gameplay. The other major difference is the choice of window dressing, and The Last Sundown has a far grittier theme than Shimmering Woods' crystals in the forest thing. Maybe this will broaden the appeal, maybe not, but it suits The Last Sundown's slightly higher volatility, and Play'n GO has presented it all in their usual attractive style.

The gameplay and features are relatively simple yet very effective when the collection feature is going well. The Last Sundown doesn't have cascades or the win multiplier Shimmering Woods had, so you're more reliant on getting a major collecting momentum on. Shimmering Woods' free spins could also start on up to 4 splitting symbols, depending on how many scatters triggered the feature, and players could get extra splitters from retriggers. You don't get that in The Last Sundown, where collecting is all. Like the last precious well of water in the middle of a fought-over futuristic patch of earth. The flip side is, if the collecting does go well, The Last Sundown has a higher max win figure than the previous game of 36,000x the bet, with a probability of being hit of one in a billion.

There are a few similarities to what Nolimit City is doing at the moment, with their growing menagerie of splits and ways features. The Last Sundown is less complex, possibly because Play'n GO is operating to a tighter schedule than their competitor, so perhaps the team doesn't have the room to really delve into the features and push envelopes with them – this is pure conjecture, of course. The Last Sundown can certainly deliver white-knuckle gaming when it fires up, and some players may welcome a more relaxed set of rules to enjoy the ride in.