Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown Slots
Based on the incredibly popular mobile gaming franchise of the same name, Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown is a faithfully-designed Spielo International slot that captures all the cute visuals and quirky humour of the series while also giving players the chance to earn some huge wins.
Using characters from the game to fill its reels, Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown is linked to three standalone progressive jackpots, namely the gold, silver and bronze flower prize pools. The current winnings in each pool are displayed at the top left of the screen and players are able to access each pool by uncovering a certain number of suns in the game’s Graveyard Bonus feature.
Flower power
Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown differs from the majority of Spielo slots in that it features the maximum 243 active paylines. Playable from between $0.50 and $2.50 per spin, it is a game that won’t break your bankroll but will offer you several ways to win, with all regular plant symbols capable of randomly kicking into life to award players with additional prize payouts after each spin.
Regular payouts in Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown occur whenever three or more identical symbols appear on any adjacent spaces, although as with most 243-payline games, you’ll need to hit several lower value wins simultaneously to make a profit on your spin. The slot’s maximum regular jackpot is 200x your total bet, which is triggered whenever sunflower icons appear on all five reels.
Beyond the standard prize awards, each plant icon in the game has a special ability that can be randomly triggered after a spin. While the exact nature of these abilities varies from symbol to symbol, generally they see adjacent royal playing card symbols transformed into instant win prizes.
Backyard beauty
If you’ve ever played the Plants vs Zombies series on your mobile or tablet device, you’ll no doubt be aware of the game’s cute cartoony theme. The good news for fans of the franchise is that Spielo’s slot conversion remains utterly faithful to the original games, with a colourful cast of plants and vegetables representing the higher value icons and randomly sprouting zombies being the wilds.
Among the symbols present in Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown are sunflowers, cherries, squashes, chompers, jalapenos, grave busters and doom and sun shrooms, each of which feature their own unique animation whenever their special ability is activated. This gives the game a fast and fluid visual style, essentially making it feel more like an arcade game than a conventional video slot.
Though playing card symbols ace-through-jack do sadly feature in Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown, the good news is that even these basic icons can become animated, with zombies randomly bursting through the ground beneath them to transform them into more valuable wilds.
Grave concerns
In addition to the special abilities of all plant icons in the game, Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown also includes a couple of bonus features to help players boost their overall winnings. The first is the Backyard Bonus, which sees players pick the winner of the garden battle that gives the slot its name, with additional cash prizes awarded if they can predict the final outcome correctly.
The second – and more important in terms of those progressive jackpot features – is the Graveyard Bonus, which transports players to a new pick and click screen displaying a number of tombstones when activated. Here, players will have to choose tombstones to unveil prizes, with some adding extra funds into the three prize pools and others helping players on their way to winning them.
What you really want to find during the Graveyard Bonus are the sun icons, as each time you find one of these you’ll move one step closer to securing a huge prize. With the bronze flower jackpot earned for finding 15 sun icons, the silver available for 25 and the massive gold jackpot triggered when 35 suns have been unveiled, every pick you make can have a serious impact on your winnings.
Bloomin’ marvellous
Regardless of whether you’re a fan of the series or not, Plants vs Zombies: Backyard Showdown is an incredibly engaging slot that will draw players in with its cute graphics and additional prize features. Though a relatively high variance game, the slot does give players the opportunity to land some serious progressive jackpot prizes, and that alone makes it more than worthy of a quick spin or two.
