Dragon Wins

Dragons! Powerful, winged beasts of ancient folklore that knights chased after, creatures that jealously guarded treasure and remained in equal measure beasts of evil and guardians of peace through the years and many different takes as fantasy franchises remain obsessed with the large, scary flying lizards. Here, they’re a little bit smaller and child-like, but make no mistake, as they’re here to make the slot’s title come true. Dragon Wins uses a honeycomb shaped layout as well as four small drakes to create a compelling experience. With 40 paylines, you’re bound to score some small wins here and there and each win with a dragon symbol in it contributes to that dragon’s meter, of which there are four in total. When one meter fills up, it triggers that dragon’s special feature. And if that’s not enough, you can also collect three or more Scatters to trigger one of two different bonuses on top of that.

The dragons certainly have interesting shapes and depart from the regular, scaled beasts, but we’re not sure if NextGen Gaming really hit the mark here. They float, and will occasionally do some idle actions, but in their regular stances, they feel really odd to look at. This isn’t much of an issue when you’re just rolling the reels, but if you stop to look, they really stick out a bit. Beyond that, all the symbols on the reel are unique, which adds bonus points for graphics. On the user interface part, we also enjoyed the wheel design, which turns depending on which section you selected. It’s great, but there is a slight delay because the symbol has to come into place, and while it is certainly charming, getting rid of that waiting time will go a long way to stopping the charm from wearing off too quickly.

On the gameplay side, it’s a simple procedure. You’ll be on a slow losing streak, with occasional spikes of income from the free spins bonuses or the four dragon meters that you’ll be slowly filling up. The small wins in the meantime won’t be enough to cover your costs, but there is at least the comfort of knowing that each dragon win brings you closer to activating a feature that can break the deadlock if you’ve been stuck for a while.

You can bet between $0.25 up to $125, which is a deal considering you have forty paylines to work with. This, alongside the somewhat frequent triggers on the dragon meters, makes it so NextGen balanced accordingly, and none of the wins really seem to stand out in our mind. The largest is only 80x the stake, so you’re more relying on getting a lot of wins in the bonuses rather than getting one giant jackpot and calling it quits. When it works, it’s awesome. When it doesn’t, it can feel quite disheartening.

While the symbols are nothing to be amazed by, they are fully unique, with no poker cards in sight, and make sense in the game universe. There are four dragons and a variety of smaller gemstones which have colours that coincide with the small drakes floating off to the side. Wilds and Scatters break that a bit, but we imagine they’ve done that to make them stand out in comparison to the other icons.

Depending on which dragon meter activates, you can get four different bonuses. Red dragon means that you will have red drakes stacked on all reels, golden dragon can turn any of the gems into more dragons, green dragon can transform the second, third and fourth reel to sometimes be full of only green dragons and purple dragon can expand to cover the reels above and beneath itself as well. When any of the meters become active, all other dragons transform into dragons of that same colour. Additionally, if you get three or more Scatters while the dragon meter features are triggered, it also prolongs those bonuses.