Give the infamous Dead or Alive a spin at Mr Green

Dead or Alive at Mr Green

The Dead or Alive slot is one of the most well-known slots on the market thanks to its infamous volatility. And by that we mean it’s a slot where you can have a pretty dry spell where wins are few and far between or… you can secure yourself some huge payouts within a few spins. It’s exactly this element of unpredictability and risk that’s made it so famous and so talked-about. It’s Western-themed so fans of cowboy movies where danger is never too far away, will surely enjoy it.

How to play Dead or Alive

The Dead or Alive slot is a 5x3 reel game with nine active paylines; the number of paylines can’t be adjusted so this is one of the areas where you don’t actually have any choice. You do however call the shots (that’s our first Western pun) when it comes to your stake per spin. By adjusting the coin value and the Level (1-4), you have full control over how much you’re prepared to wager per spin.

As a little bonus, every time you adjust the coin value amount, you hear the sound of a whip cracking, which is nicely in line with the theme of the slot. If you want to cut straight to the ‘final showdown gunfight’, just hit ‘Max Bet’ because as the name suggests, you’ll play the next spin for the maximum stake allowed, which is 18 GBP/Euros. If you missed lunch and your energy levels are low to the extent that you’d rather not have to keep pressing the spin button, you can just select your desired betting stake and press Autoplay.

At the simplest level, you can choose how many spins you want the game to play for you. At a more advanced level you can also choose certain events that will bring the Autoplay to a close, such as if the free spins are activated, or if a single win increases your bank by a certain amount.

Dead or Alive Features

In keeping with the theme of the game, the symbols are all related to the Wild Wild West. We’ll talk about the special symbols in due course but the regular ones are: a cowboy hat, boots with stirrups, the loaded gun in the holster, a Sheriff’s badge and a shot of whiskey. Then there are the inevitable playing cards, acting as lower-value symbols. Any three identical symbols on adjacent reels secure you a win but an interesting characteristic of the game is that they don’t necessarily have to be in a straight line. So, you could have the Badge on the middle line of the first reel and two more Badges on the bottom of the second and third reels and you’d still have three Badges making up a winning line.

Dead or Alive Wild symbol
It’s not just in the free spins round that the Wild symbol is important. The Wild- which is a Wanted poster of an unnamed outlaw – also appears in the base game and like in any other slot game, can substitute for any symbol except for the Scatter. It can appear anywhere on the reels. It not only helps you to secure wins but also helps you secure more than one win within the same spin, especially if you’re lucky enough to get two or more Wilds with one spin.

Dead or Alive Bonus Features

The Dead or Alive free spins feature is what this game is all about and where you either become the cowboy licking his gun wounds or the victorious gunslinger riding way into the sunset with pockets loaded and the town’s beautiful girl riding alongside him. Crucial to activating the frees spins round is the scatter symbol, represented by two pistols and some live bullets. They can appear anywhere on the reels and any three of them will take you straight to the free spins round; you don’t need them to be perfectly aligned like you would in other slots for the bonus round to commence. By the way, getting two Scatter symbols wins you an instant prize- double your stake- but doesn’t activate the free spins.

Once the free spins get under way, you have 12 of them to look forward to. The first bit of good news is that any wins you get during the free spins round are automatically doubled. The even better news is that any Wild that appears in place during the free spins will remain there for the remainder of the round as a Sticky Wild. There are five different outlaws who can appear and getting all five of them on the reels will buy you another five free spins. As you’ve probably guessed by now, it’s when you have several Sticky Wilds on the reels that those huge wins start to appear.

Conclusion:

Slots come in all shapes and sizes and Dead or Alive won’t be for everyone. Some will feel there isn’t enough going on here to make it the most fun of slots. Others will feel that the game’s high volatility where you can sometimes go a while without any significant wins makes it a bit too risky for them. To these people we say ‘that’s part of the game and when there are dry spells, you just have to bite the bullet’ (our final Western pun).

There are plenty of other slots with low-to-medium volatility and there are others where there are three or four bonus features as opposed to this one where there’s just the one.

But maybe that’s exactly the point. Its simplicity, Cowboy theme and high volatility are precisely what makes it so unique and one of those slots that everyone has heard of. Worth playing at least once just to see what the fuss is all about.