The Goonies Return slot brings back one of the busiest toolkits Blueprint has built, six wheel bonuses and a set of base-game modifiers with a gamble to move between them, and gives it a top end to match. The first Goonies was a brilliant slot in all but one respect, its biggest win capped at 1,000x for all that machinery. The sequel keeps every piece of it, from the 20-line paytable to the Never Say Die skulls, and rebuilds One-Eyed Willy’s top round into an expanding hold-and-win worth up to 50,000x.
Most of what happens between bonuses comes from the One-Eyed Willy Key of Plenty, a modifier that can fire on any spin. The key glows as it lands, green for the standard modifier, though a rarer red or golden key can appear, and the gold one can even hide a bonus behind it. Whichever it is, it sets off one of seven modifiers.
The follow-up adds the One-Eyed Willy Exchange. A win of 15x your bet or more brings up a choice. Take it, or trade it for a spin of the Exchange wheel and a shot at a feature, moving up from Bonus to Super Bonus to Mega Bonus as you go. Push your luck, and the wheel might land you on a Mystery Win instead, a flat cash prize that ends the run there
Collect 3 or more bonus scatters, and the main event opens. There is no payout for landing them, just a spin of the ship’s wheel, which stops on one of six rounds ranked from the modest up to One-Eyed Willy Riches at the top.
After any round but the top one, the Feature Gamble lets you collect or push higher, one feature at a time, all the way to One-Eyed Willy Riches if the wins keep coming.
This is where the sequel makes its biggest change. In the original, the top round was a single run of values that stopped at a set point, held well short of everything else on offer. Here it becomes a hold-and-win. You begin with 3 money spins on a grid of individual reels, each cash symbol resetting the count to 3, while the Goonies work the board. Mikey adds an overall multiplier and Data awards an extra spin. Mouth folds every value on screen into one, Gold Coin upgrades every symbol in view, and Sloth restarts the powers of every other character symbol currently on the board. One-Eyed Willy himself widens the grid a column at a time, out to nine reels by four. Fill it, or run the spins out, and the total is paid as a bet multiple, up to 50,000x.
Not much about the board has moved from the 2018 game. It plays over 5 reels and 3 rows, on 20 fixed lines, with wins read from the left. The wild pays from 2 matching symbols, and stands in for all but the bonus scatter, while the skull-and-crossbones flag matches it rung for rung, both at the same values as before. The card ranks beneath them haven’t moved either. The only change that matters sits in the two premium rows, where a treasure chest, a shipwreck, a skull and a gold scale once stood. The numbers are identical, but the Goonies characters have taken their place. You can play from $0.10 to $10 per spin, with the full game available in free play.
Line wins pay on the value staked per line, not the whole spin, which is easy to forget at the paytable. At our $1 spin, split over 20 lines, that is 5 cents a line, so the Medallion wild’s 500x top row actually pays $25, not the $500 the table indicates.
| Symbol | x5 | x4 | x3 | x2 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medallion Wild / Skull & Crossbones | 500 | 100 | 40 | 2 |
| Chunk & Mikey | 300 | 80 | 20 | – |
| Data & Mouth | 200 | 60 | 10 | – |
| A, K | 100 | 40 | 8 | – |
| Q, J | 50 | 10 | 4 | – |
Each figure is a multiple of the line bet, 5 cents at our $1, 20-line spin, not the total stake.
The first game was one of Blueprint's best licensed slots, and its shape is carried over intact, even as the features within it have been reworked. Play the two side by side and the Return is unmistakably the same game, which is meant as a compliment. The change that matters is the part that always held it back. Its top round used to be an afterthought. Now it is a hold-and-win big enough to pay for the hours the rest of the game asks of you, and the 4.3 we gave the original becomes a 4.4. A slightly lower demo return is why it does not go higher, and the wheel's randomness is the same gamble the original always asked of you.
The One-Eyed Willy round is the reward that actually matters here, the rare kind of change that alters what a game can do, when most only restyle the surface. Around it, the Key of Plenty keeps play busy, firing enough that long runs without a bonus seldom feel dead, and the modifiers under it do more than the six they grew out of. The licence is handled with evident care, the Goonies themselves promoted to the pay symbols and the film’s voices still in place. Six very different rounds sit under the wheel, from a key-turn in a cave to a two-stage waterfall trail.
Getting to that wheel is the catch. Bonus symbols land freely, usually in pairs, but the last of the trio can take an age. Ours arrived after more than 100 spins, and with no buy-in, there is no way to hurry it. Once you are in, the wheel picks the round for you, same as it always has, so the one you want is no sure thing. The demo also runs at 95.50%, a shade below the 2018 game’s 96%, and it shows over a long sitting.
For a long stretch we saw no bonus at all, and it barely mattered, because the Key of Plenty kept showing up. Shooting spikes cleared two columns and dropped $16 into the balance. A key a few spins later opened Lucky Coins, 52 of them, for $10. Then a scythe swept the reels into a fresh $6.40. None of it was large, but the reels rarely sat still.
What we were waiting on was the wheel, and the game knows how to make you feel the wait. On 3 of our opening 4 spins, two bonus symbols landed, and the reels slowed; the adventure theme tightened the way it did before, only for the last one to miss and the music to sag into a groan. That trick is still one of the best things here, and it sets up the frustration too, since the bonus symbols tease far more than they pay.
When the bonus finally arrived, off the back of another coin round, the wheel spun and settled on Booby Trap. We were offered a gamble up to Waterslide to Wealth, or the round we already won, and we chose to bank it. Turning the key left or right, we pushed five turns and collected 15x with the multipliers gathered on the way. Booby Trap is small and self-contained, and a decent taste of what the other five are like. Which one the wheel gives you first is down to chance; the gamble afterwards is the only choice you get.
What we did not reach in one sitting was One-Eyed Willy Riches, the top round the game builds toward. It is where the follow-up does the work that counts, a formality in the original now rebuilt into a hold-and-win that finally justifies the hunt. Getting there still leans on luck, the new Exchange aside, which at least hands a big win a straight shot at a feature.
Three years on, the top prize finally matches the machinery that leads to it. The wait to get there, and a return that dips below the earlier game’s, are the price, but this is the Goonies with its one weak spot fixed, and every bit the game it was.
