Blood Rebels

Blood Rebels: Slot Overview

Strap on your riot gear, players, we're taking to the streets with Bullshark Games in the studio's smash authority slot, Blood Rebels. You have to have a pretty strong reason for wanting to bring about a hard societal reset, and in this instance, the smashing is inspired by securing loot, where we meet two beefy brothers, a hip-hop soundtrack, and a darkly depressing game world. Quite a shift for a studio that usually churns out positively bubbly slots full of lovable characters inhabiting cartoon-bright worlds. The question for now is whether Bullshark Games will pair the thematic 180 with equally unexpected mechanics.

Fire up Blood Rebels and you'll meet the two rebellious siblings right away, both at the load screen and while the game is in play. That's them standing threateningly next to the grid, one armed with a spiky bat, the other, fists raised, ready to bop someone. Even though they don't look like the sort of chaps a regular upstanding member of the community would want to mess with, you do want them landing on the actual reels, since each brother is in command of a special Flip feature. They hang in a pretty dismal-looking place, which, at a guess, is the back streets of New York City in the base game, if the water towers in the background are any sort of clue, before moving into full riot mode for free spins where there's a burning car, a burning barrel, a burning stadium, just a whole lot of burning.

Blood Rebels is a paylines game, and there are 20 of them built into its 5x4 gaming area. Fuelling the riot is a medium volatile math model, available in two RTP variants, where 96.26% is the higher option. Players may wager $/€0.10 to $/€75, with the usual assortment of Hacksaw Gaming family feature buys attached.

Low pays in Blood Rebels are its 10-Anarchy card royals, while its highs are teeth, brass knuckles, crowbars, lighters, and Molotov cocktails. A line of five matching royals pays 1x to 1.5x the bet, or 3x to 10x the bet when landing a line of five matching premium symbols. Wilds land in any phase, and they substitute for all symbols in the paytable. A winning line of five wilds pays 15x the bet.

Blood Rebels: Slot Features

Blood Rebels features are a global multiplier, Flip and Mass Flip symbols, the Breaking Curfew bonus, the Total Anarchy bonus, and feature buys.

Global Multiplier

Blood Rebels' global multiplier has a default value of x1, and it applies to all wins. In the base game, the global multiplier resets with each new spin.

Single Flip Symbols & Mass Flip Symbols

Both Flip symbol types can land in the base game and bonus rounds. When a Single Flip symbol lands, it chooses one type of low-pay symbol and all instances of it are turned into wilds. Flip symbols turn into wilds as well. Flip symbols may also reveal a value of x1 to x100, which is added to the global multiplier. When more than one Single Flip symbol lands, they each transform a different type of low-pay symbol to wilds - up to 5 can appear at once. One thing to note: Single Flip symbols can choose symbols that are not present on the reels. Mass Flip symbols act in the same way as Single Flips, except just one can land at a time, and it transforms all low-pay symbols into wilds.

Breaking Curfew

Hitting 3 scatters awards 8 free spins, or 4 scatters grant 10 free spins in the Breaking Curfew round. During this bonus, the global multiplier is progressive until free spins end. Each landed scatter adds +1 free spin.

Total Anarchy

Hitting 5 scatters awards 10 free spins in the Total Anarchy feature. This bonus uses the same mechanics as Breaking Curfew, plus Sticky Wilds may land, which remain locked in position until the end of the round. Sticky Wilds cannot be added by either Flip symbols.

Feature Buys

Blood Rebels' feature buys include BonusHunt FeatureSpins, which make each spin 5 times more likely to trigger a bonus for 3x, or First Stone FeatureSpins for 50x to guarantee at least one Single Flip or Mass Flip symbol lands. Breaking Curfew can be bought for 100x or Total Anarchy for 200x the stake.

Blood Rebels: Slot Verdict

Blood Rebels came as a surprise from Bullshark Games. The studio has a track record of filling its slots with cutey pie characters like those found in Crowned Corners, Lemur Levels, or Bullride Loot. Even the studio's last crime-related slot, Behind Bars Masterplan, was populated by the sort of cartoon criminals that look like they would be into white-collar crime rather than anything physically threatening. Blood Rebels is something of an anomaly, being a rough and ready street punk of a game, looking to raise hell for the lols, cause a riot, smash authority, and all that. On a side note, even if Blood Rebels does stick out like a sore thumb, it does link back to Bullshark Games' very first release, Mafia Clash, which set a dangerous tone that the studio never really followed up on till now.

To answer the question posed in the intro, Blood Rebels' features aren't entirely unpredictable, but Bullshark Games has injected a point of interest with its Flip symbols. On their own, even the Single Flip can turn a spin around, though the Mass Flip is obviously much more desirable, since it will make every single royal on the board wild. Even then, wild transformations only really picked up when Flip symbols were also adding values to the global multiplier, though there is no guarantee they will do so. Then things can get interesting. It might have been even more interesting if Blood Rebels had a hidden bonus that guaranteed multiplier values would be added by Flip symbols, but as it stands, the game can produce wins up to a cap of 12,000x in any mode, meaning there's a potent cocktail here set to ignite.

In some ways, Blood Rebels marks a rebellious move for Bullshark Games, trading its signature light hearted approach to take a grittier, more dangerous angle. The features are less adventurous, perhaps, but the Flip idea is a good one, especially when building the global multiplier, and everything fits together nicely. It may not introduce brand new ideas, but Blood Rebels executes its mechanics well enough to make it a decent choice for players who enjoy a wild symbol, win multiplier combo in a dark and dangerous world.