Buster's Bones Slot Review

A cartoon Wild West where every outlaw is a dog and the law is a droopy bloodhound in a sheriff's hat. His name is Buster. He is the wild, and he is also the only multiplier the game has.

The board is a 6x6 saloon-porch grid paying clusters of five or more symbols that touch horizontally or vertically, with the usual avalanche refill after every win. Ordinary so far. What isn't ordinary is what happens when bones land while Buster is on the grid: he sets off walking, eats them one at a time, and leaves a wild in every square he steps out of while each bone's value gets bolted onto his multiplier.

Bones are worth +1, +2, +3 or +5, and random drops keep tossing them onto the reels, so this fires far more often than a once-a-session bonus. Only one Buster is allowed out there at a time, which is the leash that stops the whole thing running away.

The grid hangs inside a timber shack on a porch, posts lashed with rope, bunting and a string of bulbs strung along the shingled roof, two brass hurricane lanterns burning either side and a horseshoe nailed up for luck. Beyond the frame it is red-rock country at sunset, mesas and hoodoos under a pink and blue sky, saguaro cactus, a WANTED poster with a dog's mugshot pinned to one of them, and a handcart heaped with bones parked on the right (someone has been busy). A cattle skull sits half-buried in the sand at the front.

The dogs carry the art. A heavy-lidded, thoroughly unimpressed hound in a blue frame, a smug boston terrier in purple, and a coyote in green with its eyes pointing in two directions and its tongue out. Low symbols are card suits branded into painted planks in orange, blue, purple and green, so even the filler reads as scuffed wood instead of the usual glass letters. Bones arrive as a white bone with a red badge on it, floating above the grid before it drops. It all looks like a Saturday-morning cartoon, and it holds that line without a single ironic wink.

Roughly a third of spins pay something, so the grid is almost never quiet and almost none of it matters. Small clusters land, clear, refill, land again. The balance drips down instead of falling, which is comfortable and slightly numbing, and the actual rhythm of a session is set by one thing only: whether bones happen to show up while Buster is out.

When they do, the game wakes up hard for about four seconds. Buster trotting from bone to bone with the number climbing over his hat is the best moment the game has. Then the round ends and it is all gone, which takes some getting used to. A big multiplier over a handful of small clusters adds up to less than it looked like it would.

Free spins flip that, and eight spins is short enough that the bonus plays out as a race. A session that gets three or four bones inside the first two spins ends up somewhere completely different from one dribbling a single +1 at a time, and there is no way to influence which one you get. That spread is wider than the friendly cartoon front suggests, and it can feel like the game is either showing off or ignoring you, with not much in between.

NetEnt built one good idea here and arranged the rest of the game around serving it. Buster's walk is worth loading it for, and the free spins are where he finally sticks around long enough for the multiplier to amount to something. The art carries more personality than the western shelf usually gets.

It probably won't hold anyone for a long session. The ceiling is modest, and for my money it sits awkwardly next to that medium-high label, while the symbol pays are thin enough that a bonus with no bones in it leaves nothing behind at all. The bones are the game. Everything else is decoration on a very nicely painted porch.