Pet Sematary terrified me as a kid. It took the comforting idea that pets go somewhere nice when they die and replaced it with, “Actually, they come back possessed and ready to ruin the furniture.” For years, every time a cat stared at me for slightly too long, I assumed it had crawled out of an ancient burial ground and was deciding which artery to start with.

With its new Zombie Dawgs slot, Backseat Gaming is pulling on those terrified nostalgia strings real hard!

Welcome to the Pet Sematary

Betting on the Zombie Dawgs slot starts at just $0.10 a spin and tops out at $35 a spin. With a 10,000x maximum multiplier, the slot gives you a shot at up to 350,000 in winnings, a figure that will be dependent on your bet amount. 

The Zombie Dawgs slot features very high volatility, which will mean the gameplay will feature long dry spells as you chase those bigger wins. Fortunately, the slot does offer a buy bonus feature to help the action along, if that’s what you need. The slot’s expected RTP is 94.01%.

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The slot features a scatter pays mechanic rather than fixed paylines or cluster pays. This means that matching symbols can appear in any position on the grid, with wins paid when eight or more appear on the reels at once.

After each winning combination, the slot’s cascading reels mechanic will remove symbols involved in a winning combination and will be replaced by new symbols falling into the empty spaces. These cascades will continue until no further wins are created.

A global multiplier is displayed beneath each reel. Nuclear Multiplier symbols that increase the global multiplier of the reel it lands on by between 1x and 3x. Super Nuclear symbols are less common and raise all six reel multipliers simultaneously.

A reel multiplier only becomes active when a Zombie Paw lands on its corresponding reel. When Zombie Paws activate multipliers on several reels during the same tumble sequence, the values are multiplied together rather than added.

During base game play, reel multipliers are reset and deactivated at the beginning of each spin. During a round of free spins, they will remain active and continue to grow throughout.

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The free spins feature has three starting configurations based on the number of scatter symbols that trigger it. 

• Three scatters award 10 free spins, with all reel multipliers beginning at 1x.
• Landing four scatters also awards 10 free spins, with all reel multipliers starting with a base value of 2x. 
• Five scatters unlock the Legendary Bonus. When this happens, all six reel multipliers begin with a base value of 3x.

Each Zombie Paw collected during your round awards three additional free spins.

Is the Zombie Dawgs slot terrifying or a little boring?

The Zombie Dawgs slot has a lot going for it. The theme is fun, and the execution is adequate. I do think the developer could have done more with the concept, but what’s here is serviceable.

The main issue is that the very high volatility prevents the action from ever really getting going. The lack of any substantial animation or new graphics when you unlock a round of free spins doesn’t help either. There’s just something missing.

I give this one a seven out of ten.

If you’re looking for a few gems from Backseat Gaming, I recommend Ghostly Hallows and Crystal Robot.