The Lost Boys

Lost Boys: Slot Overview

'Now you know what we are, now you know what you are. You'll never grow old, Michael, and you'll never die. But you must feed.' So said Keifer Sutherland's character David to newly blooded Michael, in the 80s cult classic film The Lost Boys after a fireside orgy of vampiric violence. It's a movie which came out in 1987, and casino game maker Blueprint Gaming has seen fit to make an online slot version 37 years after the fact. That's a lengthy amount of time, but the studio has a habit of finding inspiration from the past and bringing it into the present. Slots The Goonies and Beavis and Butt-Head are two other examples of this tendency. Blueprint Gaming is also a studio in the habit of reusing a lot of the same old gaming ideas, of which The Lost Boys might well be judged guilty of.

The amusement park area of Santa Carla is the setting for The Lost Boys' base game. An enormous full moon beams down on Ferris wheels and other attractions. A bit of a shame the pony-tailed dude wailing on a saxophone didn't make his way into the game, as the scene he was in really epitomised the 1980s. Never mind, players get a bunch of the main characters on the reels as pay symbols, and vampires rare their bloodied fangs at other points, which is cool. Still, while the nostalgic pangs are there, The Lost Boys came across as a somewhat hastily slapped-together production; could have done more was one phrase that came to mind.

Clicking the coin button brings up the stake select menu, where the choices range from 10 c to $/€100 per spin. The version of The Lost Boys reviewed had Rapid Fire Jackpots attached, so the RTP came out as 91% + 0.66% JP + Reserve 0.33%, which is low even for a jackpot slot. However, higher versions may be available that shun the jackpot element the way Michael rejected the whole exist forever on blood lifestyle. Medium-high volatile, The Lost Boys plays out on a 5x3 matrix inlaid with 10 paylines.

White paint style J-A royals are The Lost Boys' low pay symbols, followed by Sam, Edgar, Michael, and a logo as the high pays. Winning combinations made up of 5 matching royals are worth 5-7.5 times the bet; the rest pay 10x to 100x for five of a kind. A Chinese takeaway box (is it worms, is it noodles?) plays the role of wild, substituting for all regular paying symbols. The wild does not land on the leftmost reel but can land anywhere else.

The Lost Boys: Slot Features

If the theme of The Lost Boys feels familiar, so do its features. For extras, the game has modifiers, Cash Collects, and free spins.

Modifiers

Any spin may randomly trigger a modifier, awarding one of these effects:

• High Stakes - randomly adds Cash symbols to the grid.
• Bonus Boost - additional scatter symbols are added to the grid.
• Blood Lust - wild symbols are added randomly to the grid.
• One Of Us - symbols are removed from the grid, and new ones drop in to award a win.

Cash Collect

If a Collect symbol lands on the rightmost reel and there are Cash symbols on any of the other four reels, then the Cash Collect feature triggers. All Collect symbols expand to cover the entire rightmost reel:

• The Collect symbol collects the values shown on the Cash symbols.
• The Respin Collect symbol collects any Cash values in view before being held in place and respinning the first 4 reels. Any new Cash symbols are collected by the Respin Collect.
• The Boost Collect symbol boosts any Cash symbols in view by up to 5x the bet before collecting the values.
• The Super Collect symbol collects any Cash symbols in view up to 5 times.

Free Spins

Hitting 3 scatter symbols on the middle three reels triggers 10 free spins. The Cash Collect feature remains available during free spins. In addition, Collect symbols are collected. Collecting 3, 6, 9, or 12 Collect symbols grants +5 free spins each time with a respective x2, x3, x5, and x10 multiplier for any Cash symbols collected.

Rapid Fire Jackpot

Landing 5 Rapid Fire logos (which are overlaid on symbols) triggers the Rapid Fire Jackpots feature. A wheel spins to award a prize of 5x to 1,000x, or the Mini, Minor, Major, Master, or Mega King. Prize values are displayed on screen.

The Lost Boys: Slot Verdict

The vampires in The Lost Boys might never grow old, but the set of features accompanying the game sure do. For whatever reason, Blueprint Gaming is firmly wedded to the collect Cash symbols action that has appeared on many, many occasions, from King Kong Cash Even Bigger Bananas to The Goonies Hey You Guys - another retro film heartstrings tugger. You don't have to unlock Collect symbols in The Lost Boys, which is appreciated, as each session instead starts with full access to all Collect symbol types. But it's hard to shrug off the same ol' Fishin' Frenzy meets Big Bass Bonanza meets a different skin impression.

Another niggle was that while the presentation of the game, the inclusion of characters and a few film locations was fun, the branding use came across as a tad half-hearted at the same time. If the makers of The Lost Boys slot were passionately driven fans of the cult classic film, the end result struggled to convince of that. For example, compare this to Stormcraft Studios' Immortal Romance, which, okay, might not have topped the original but oozed attention to detail. Then again, maybe the makers of The Lost Boys were absolute fans, but the time, resources and direction to produce a real knockout crossover just weren't available. As it is, the familiar faces raised a smile, and who'd have thought the film would splash across the reels this long after it hit movie screens? Reason enough for fans to at least have a look. A 10,000x the bet win cap (or €250,000 limit) might help motivate, as well.

So, The Lost Boys does possess a measure of feel-good factor, hard to doubt that emotional effect. It's just too bad the game's been loaded with the same old features Blueprint Gaming insists on trundling out time and time again. Makes you wonder, would vampiric immortality be so great if, after a long enough period of time, you've seen it all and everything feels like a repeat? That and all the bloody murder of innocent people, of course.