Dead Headz

Dead Headz: Slot Overview

If bigger is better, then the ever-increasing group of studios milling around software provider Hacksaw Gaming is a testament to the developer's power and prestige in the industry. The latest team to join the fold, at the time of writing, is Jinx Gaming, an outfit so new they don't even have a website (yet). All we've got to go on is the fruits of its labour, which means a rising from the grave to consume brains, zombie-themed online slot going by the name of Dead Headz, that boasts a unique destroy the shambling horde to survive Shoot & Loot feature.

Dead Headz gives off full-blown black and white old school horror movie vibes, with the game's logo dripping fluids on one side of the screen. The base game background is a graveyard bathed in the light of a full moon, which looks like an ideal place for the harvesting of zombies. The bonus round is completely different, though, in just about every way. Not so much colour palette, since it's predominantly black and white as well, but during the free spins phase, Dead Headz becomes vaguely video game-ish, in a Days Gone, Dead Rising, World War Z on a shoestring budget type way.

Till the bonus round kicks in, Dead Headz is played on a 5x5 grid, landing winning combinations along 19 paylines. Powered by Hacksaw OpenRGS, players click up and down arrows to choose a stake of $/€0.10 to $/€100 per spin, though the satisfying doop-doop sounds are missing when doing so. A 5 out of 5 score means Dead Headz is highly volatile, and comes with an RTP of 96.31%, or 94.34% on the lower setting.

Payline wins play second fiddle in a game like this, but players still collect 1x to 2x the bet when landing five matching 10-A card ranks in a line, or 7.5x to 25x when hitting a combination of 5 matching zombie symbols.

Dead Headz: Slot Features

In the base game, Dead Headz benefits from wild multipliers until free spins trigger, where the gameplay morphs into Shoot & Loot mode, with a feature buy attached.

Wild Multipliers

Wild symbols may hit on any reel to substitute for all paying symbols - one per reel. When a wild is part of a winning line, it reveals a multiplier of x2 to x20, which applies to any win the wild multiplier is part of. Multipliers are combined when more than one is part of the same win. Landing 5 wilds in a payline awards 100x the bet.

Shoot & Loot Waves Bonus Game

The Shoot & Loot Waves bonus is played on a 3-reel, 6-row gaming area. Hitting 3, 4, or 5 scatters triggers free spins with an x1, x5, or x10 starting multiplier on all three reels, respectively. On each wave (spin), a gun cylinder spins to land up to 3 bullets. Bullets that land on the left, middle, or right shoot the nearest zombie on the leftmost, middle, or rightmost reel, respectively.

At the start of each wave, new zombies spawn at the back of the screen and move forward 1 row if they are not shot. Shot zombies apply a value to the counter above them. Blue zombies reveal a value which is added to the meter of the reel they are on, while Green zombies reveal a value which is added to all three meters. Possible values range from +1 to +20. Orange zombies multiply their reel value by x2 to x20, while Red zombies multiply all reels by x2 to x20. When a zombie reaches the player, the round ends. The value of all three meters is added together, and the total amount is awarded.

Feature Buy

Dead Headz's one and only feature buy is a free spins trigger costing 150x the bet to activate.

Dead Headz: Slot Verdict

Dead Headz is a fairly promising first-up slot for a new studio on the make. Encouragingly, Jinx Gaming has cooked up something that might not be the greatest thing to crawl out of a gaming studio, but is nevertheless curious enough to warrant a look. We're talking about the bonus round, predominantly here. Dead Headz's base game is underwhelming. It does have wild multipliers, can't argue about them, yet for a Hacksaw Gaming studio, the main game is about as mundane as folding the laundry, not to mention incapable of hitting the 10,000x win cap.

Things heat up when the Shoot & Loot is in play. It can be a little slow going. Even with Super Turbo engaged, it could feel like walking through treacle at times. It could also be very frustrating watching zombies shamble towards you and the cylinder refusing to produce bullets where you need them most. In those moments, the Shoot & Loot bonus is like a dream where you're trying to scream but no sound issues forth from your mouth, so the zombies keep on coming, coating the screen in blood as the round comes crashing to a halt. The opposite might happen as well, though, when bullets are flying, zombies are disintegrating, and reel multipliers are racking up crazy numbers boosted by additive and multiplicative values. It's like a three-dimensional, bullets flying, fight for your life version of Chaos Crew's bonus round.

Dead Headz doesn't stand out the way other new studio debuts from say, Shady Lady or Sneaky Slots have done. However, Dead Headz is quite novel, and for a debut, Jinx Gaming has displayed an admirable level of dare to be unusual bravado, teeing up curiosity for what's to come. It's not a knockout, but what's here is enough to suggest Jinx Gaming isn't afraid to play a little weird and out there.