Sam on the Beach Slot Elk Studios

Playing this game for a while now. Graphics are nice. In free spins the Ëlectric Treat" is a nice feature.

Sam on the Beach is one more newly released game from Elk Studios, but I personally do not like games from Elk Studios, partly because their games are so very difficult to load up with a slow internet connection! I have tried loading Elk Studios games when my ISP was running slow, and each game just wouldn't load up at all. It would just hang for ever! Once my ISP has regained its speed, then no more loading problems. Elk Studios should look into being more slow-ISP friendly, like with other game providers. Very slow in loading up, but at least I could still play the game after a long long wait. Better than not being able to at all.

Once again, Casumo provided me with a good opportunity to try out Sam on the Beach. I had gotten 5 free Super Spins on the game Twin Spin, which gave me a 70 EUR win, so I decided to play Sam on the Beach upon getting that win. I didn't like at all the earlier game of Electric Sam, but I kept an open mind on this new game. The features on both games are about similar, with Sam still awarding a random Wild symbol when triggered. The logo itself, Sam on the Beach, is the Wild symbol, but is a totally dumb Wild symbol for not paying anything for itself, not doubling any wins with it, and not becoming stacked or expanded on the reels. All it does is to substitute for other symbols except the Scatter symbol. The Bell is the Scatter symbol, yet another dumb symbol for not paying anything for itself, but getting 3, 4 or 5 Bells award 5, 10 or 15 free spins without any multiplier. Argh! No multiplier no fun! Each appearing Bell during the free spins add +1 more free spin, but getting 3 or more of the Bells retrigger the Free Spins game.

In the base game, getting all 4 family members side by side on any active payline awards 1 Beach Memories Respin, with all the 4 family member icons becoming Sticky Wilds for that one respin. A 5-of-a-kind win is always guaranteed, but the payouts are usually not that big, unfortunately. During the free spins, any of the 4 'Electric Treat' feature games can be triggered when 3 or more of the corresponding family member symbols lands on any payline. The 4 'Electric Treat' features are: Sam - awarding one random Sticky Wild symbol anywhere on the reels, Sandra - awarding a +1 free spin multiplier, Maggie - awarding one Rolling Reel Respin by removing random symbols on the reels, and Ted - awarding a Sticky 2x or 3x Multiplier to one of his icons on the reel. Quite a good variety of features from each family member, which should keep interest in the game going.

As for the other symbols in the game, they all have an incredibly low win value for each. Sam pays 5x the total bet, Ted pays 3x, Sandra pays 2x, Maggie pays 1.5x, whilst the Crab, the Seahorse and the Starfish each pays 1x the total bet, all for getting 5 of each kind. A very disappointingly low paytable, typical of all recent 243 ways to win games. No new game wants to pay big nowadays. All preferring to pay small but more frequently. Serious diehard slot lovers may not appreciate this at all. Neither do I.

“Sam on the Beach” is the next slot in the “Electric Sam” slot series, both manufactured by the company “Elk Studios,” and like its predecessor, the structure of this slot is 5 x 3 reels and it is also provided with 243 pay lines.

It is undeniable that the design of this game is quite colorful and attractive to the eye; however, I believe 100 credits per spin is a fairly high price considering the low prices established in the paytable; and even its interesting special features do not seem to justify the high bet’s cost.

So, today I could not get a single round of more than 5 free spins, and not even the best “Electric Treats” got excellent results in such a short round, and I say this because during my best round I could only win about 56x my total bet, which is not much if we consider everything that we have to spend in dead spins and hits with tiny payouts.

For its part, “Beach Memories Respin” is a very interesting feature because when this is triggered we always have 4 wilds located on 4 different reels, which ensures at least the formation of two lines of 5 of a kind and some shorter lines, this in the case it appears some scatter on the column without wild; if no scatter appears on that column, then we will have 3 lines of 5 of a kind, plus the other shorter lines of 3 and 4 of a kind.

In any case, this latter feature is also affected by weakness of the paytable, and this is precisely what this game showed me today when my maximum payout coming from this feature was only 16 times my total bet during one of the 4 or 5 times in which I managed to trigger it; not too much for getting 4 simultaneous wilds on different reels in a 243-line slot.

During the base game I occasionally achieved some interesting hits when I managed to form 5 of kind lines with stacked symbols, but today even these few wonderful hits couldn’t avoid my defeat.

Summing up a bit, I think “Sam on the Beach” is a slot that has a nice theme and also has an interesting pair of special features, but unfortunately the cost of the bet per spin is quite high and prices per line on the paytable rather modest, and it seems so hard to me fighting under these not so favorable circumstances.