The roar of a dragon and the heat of its breath can really knock you for six in many games, both online and on consoles, but not with Dragon Kingdom. Although there’s the chance to sustain heavy damage, it’s only to your wallet and not about your person.
Pragmatic Play is the brand behind this set of 5 reels and 25 win lines, though in truth it could belong to any gaming company, such is the genericness of the interface. Don’t get us wrong, the title looks amazing, but it has no set features that associate it with one brand and one alone.
Despite the staple setup, everything feels a lot larger with this real money slot - the squares are huge and the tiles dominate each of the spaces they inhabit. You feel like a dwarf in the land of the giants, which while fitting for the game, gives a foreboding atmosphere charged with tension. It tells us this isn’t going to be an easy going game, and so those who want nice and simple should perhaps wander to pastures away from the furnace raging inside this matrix.
In the midst of the average looking card value symbols, there’s some truly breath-taking artwork to be found, one of which is a glowing gateway into an unknown land; this is your scatter symbol. Scatter icons can take on many properties, but mostly they bring in a series of free games, in Dragon Kingdom’s case you can get as many as five spins.
Even though the initial amount is low, there’s opportunity to trigger an additional three of them, with no limit placed on how often this can occur. Overwhelming it may not be, but it gives you potential wins in short, sharp bursts. Fortunately for all gamers, there’s a little something extra to sweeten the deal: before the rounds begin, a list of five symbols will be shown to you.
You’re about to select no only which of the stacked symbols you’d like to champion as your favorite, but also which multiplier you’d like to go with it. The higher the level of the multiplier the larger the volatility, which will mean the more difficult obtaining that symbol will become.
Figuring out the pay outs of slot machines can be incredibly difficult, as some state currency while others have credits or coins, in this case your payment is in the latter. Usually there’s some kind of conversion rate, but one isn’t given here, which we assume means that the coins you’re given literally translate into the euro amount, though we could be wrong.
What this means, on the simplest of levels, is that the maximum pay out you can get is 1,000 coins. We haven’t taken into account any multipliers of wins on top, but just the base amount of the highest paying tile, with the maximum bet having been used.
Pragmatic Play, while a good brand, has a terrible design element that really grinds on us, and that’s that it gives two variants of your bet, one with decimal placings and the other without. The without one is the first one you see, thus leading you to think you’re playing with much more than you actually are. For example, if you play with 10 coins valued at 0.01 upon each line, your bet is tallied at 250. Sounds steep doesn’t it? What it actually is is 2.50 credits.
Such a small detail can have a dramatic effect on who plays and who walks away; after all, not all of us will take the time to work out our bets before playing. Who wants to do maths when you expect the game to do it for you…!
At the end of each play through, you can’t say that you haven’t been thrilled when playing Dragon Kingdom. That being said, nor can you say that you gripped the edges of your seat as you played through each round. As a result, we end up with a slot machine that is of average entertainment value, with low returns and a low pay-in.
This feels like it should have been way more epic than it was, and so in terms of how successful the brand was at capturing the theme, they were lukewarm at best. Dragons should be fierce; while the atmosphere within the game is harsh, the game play is timid.
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