Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood

Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood: Slot Overview

To paraphrase the Cowboy Poetry of Arthur Chapman, 'Out where the skies are bluer, and the friendships truer, that's where the West begins.' Sounds nice. Perhaps that's why so many developers return to the Wild West to theme their games. Not always, though, because Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood from Quickspin portrays the West as a bleakly dangerous place indeed. The perception of danger is confirmed by the game's back story, which tells a tale of revenge undertaken by a deputy sheriff called Tex Tallonis, whose family was lost, and who now wants payback on the guilty parties.

Trail of Blood is the fourth instalment in Quickspin's popular Sticky Bandit range, which has seen the series dip and dive between hype, tease, thrill, and suspense. For number four, Quickspin has left the wind-swept rocky vistas of the previous three games and moved the 5x3 game panel into town. In doing so, the series has taken a darker turn, leaving behind the sun-drenched stretches of the rural West for the confines of town life. Gone are the blue skies, cacti, and rock monuments of earlier Sticky Bandit slots, to be replaced with clouds and gallows. Whether this thematic u-turn is coincidental or prompted by the success of powerfully grim slots like Tombstone RIP, it's hard to say, but there is a definite change in vibe, and it looks good.

One trait common in the Sticky Bandits range is the possession of a highly volatile math model, which Trail of Blood is certainly guilty of. Checking the info screen when the game loads will alert you to which RTP version you may be about to play. The return value maxes out at 96.23% but is available at two lower settings. Any device may be used for finding vengeance on, where stakes of 10 p/c to $/€100 are available. Another big difference between Trail of Blood and the first two Sticky Bandit slots is winning potential. None of this bringing a knife to a shootout feeling of those games, Trail of Blood is loaded with big numbers.

Starting on the less profitable side of the paytable, we find four Western fonted J-A card royals, paying 4 to 10 times the bet for five of a kind. Rewards rise to 20 to 75x the bet when landing five of the premium fire bombs, brass knuckles, knives, or revolvers. Across the 10 paylines, at least three low pay or two high pay symbols are needed to create a winning line. Helping out with the task are five different character displaying wild symbols. Though the pictures change, all wilds behave the same way in that they replace regular pay symbols or payout 300x the bet for five wilds on a line.

Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood: Slot Features

As the title says, Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood is all about putting its sticky wilds to good use. During the base game, what you want is to do is land 3, 4, or 5 wilds to win 10, 12, or 15 Revenge Free Spins respectively.

When the bonus round starts, the triggering wild symbols are locked in place where they stay for the full duration. If any new wild symbol lands, it also sticks for the rest of the feature and awards +1 extra Revenge Free Spin. This means that filling a win line of sticky wilds repeat pays you 300x the bet per locked line for every free spin. A line of wilds is known as a Trail of Blood in these parts.

Buy Feature

Selecting the bonus buy feature button, if available in your region of the world, presents two possible options. By paying 100x the bet, you can buy a game round guaranteed to land at least 3 triggering wilds, or pay 400x the bet for a game round with at least four triggering wilds. The RTP for the 100x option is 96.36%, and 96.68% for the 400x the bet option.

Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood: Slot Verdict

As you can probably tell after breezing through the features section, Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood is a no-nonsense, uncomplicated battle for revenge, oops we meant, line wins. There isn't anything remotely complex about Trail of Blood; it's just you and sticky wilds, like some sort of slot based one on one shootout in the street. The dramatic tone change from light and airy found in previous Sticky Bandit slots to dark and gloomy matches the ethos of Trail of Blood like a charm. Any player with a soft spot for a harder-edged Western would do well to give Trail of Blood the once or twice over.

If we could humbly put forth some feedback, it would be that the absence of any sort of multiplication function does feel missing from time to time. Fair dues, adding multipliers would be the obvious option and was already used in a former Sticky Bandits game, not to mention famously in Dead or Alive 2, one of the kingpins of the Western slot genre. Without them, it can be tough to gain much traction in the bonus game without hitting a full wild line, though. An example of this struggle occurred in one of the earlier bonus games when four wilds were stuck to a payline and looked promising. However, only royals landed in the coveted fifth spot from then till the round ended, so the whole thing withered away without much fanfare. Hey, such is fortune, and even in this few frills, non-multiplying game, winning potential is solid at 17,000x the bet, so no real complaints there.

So, if you're in the market for a hard-hitting Western slot but aren't up for the brutal complexity of Tombstone RIP or being torn up by DOA2, consider taking Sticky Bandits Trail of Blood for a whirl. It looks tops, has bags of attitude, and is governed by a set of uncomplicated rules that let players focus on enjoying some straight shootin' sticky wild action.