Dragon’s Dawn

Dragon's Dawn: Slot Overview

Software provider Stakelogic's fantasy game Dragon's Dawn is 'based on a mystical land far far away from the earth or any other planet any of us could think of.' Do they mean 'us' as in the studio or 'us' as in humankind? Because scientists have discovered, ergo had thoughts of a planet romantically called K2-2016-BLG-0005Lb, using the Kepler space telescope that is 16,960 light years away. In other words, we're a long, long way from home when playing Dragon's Dawn, which is a scatter-paying slot with a bag of goodies on offer.

Dragon's Dawn's base game is played in the Light Realm, so it's all nice and fantasy, with majestic buildings perched amidst vegetation, waterfalls, and a hovering dragon. The soundtrack is very thematic, too, making the presentation quite absorbing. Trigger free spins, and the action moves to the Fire Realm, a place of rocky mountains, deep red lighting, and another majestic structure. In both realms, gamblers are joined by a staff-wielding wizard with a flowing beard, Merlin/Gandalf style, as they try their luck.

Played on a 6x6 arranged game board, wins are created when 8 or more identical pay symbols land in any position on the grid. A scatter paying slot, there are no ways or paylines, and winning symbols do not have to be connected to each other in any way. With an RTP of 96%, Dragon's Dawn is medium-high volatile and takes bets of 10 c to $/€50 per spin.

Dragons appear throughout the game at various points, and one of these points is on the pay symbols. The 4 highest value symbols are dragons, followed by 4 gemstone mids, and J-A card rank lows. When 8-9 identical pay symbols are in view, players win 0.2 to 10 times their bet or 2 to 200 times their bet for hitting 12+ matching symbols. Wilds are available on all of the reels, too, which you don't often get in a scatter-paying slot, substituting for all symbols except the scatter.

Dragon's Dawn: Slot Features

Dragon's Dawn's features are made up of cascading wins, 3 last chance reel modifiers, a free spins round with a rising multiplier, and three bonus buy options.

Cascades

Cascades means all winning symbols in a scatter win are removed from the reels when they appear. This causes symbols to cascade downwards to fill the spaces, providing another chance to win. Winning cascades repeat like this till no new win appears. In addition, a win multiplier, which starts at x1, rising by +1 following winning cascades is used in the base game and in free spins. In the base game, the win multiplier resets between spins.

Reel Modifiers

There are 3 last-chance modifiers which may trigger in the base game and free spins at the end of a winning spin. They replace reel symbols to provide an extra chance to win.

• Lightning Strike – 1 to 6 reels are struck by lightning, replacing all symbols on them with a symbol of the same randomly chosen type.
• Meteor Shower – a random amount of reel symbols are replaced with 3 to 10 wild symbols.
• Portal – a portal appears showing 12 pay symbols which replace a random number of positions on the reels.

Free Spins

Landing 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols will grant you 8, 12, or 15 free spins, respectively. The free spins bonus round can be retriggered. Here, each cascade increases the win multiplier by +1, and it applies to any wins. However, the multiplier does not reset until the feature is complete.

Buy Bonus

At the buy bonus, players can buy 10 free spins for 100x the bet, 12 free spins for 150x the bet, or 15 free spins for 250x the bet.

Super Wheel

The Super Wheel is an optional side bet which doubles the stake when activated but does not double the pay table. This feature gives players the chance to be part of a live-casino bonus wheel. It has an average hit frequency of 1 in 75 spins, where participants can win up to 5,000x the bet. Prizes include instant win stake multipliers of 10x to 200x, plus there are three bonus games. The average RTP for the Super Wheel is 93%.

Dragon's Dawn: Slot Verdict

Gamblers in the mood to throw off the shackles of reality and indulge in a fantasy-based slot of wizardry and big flying beasts could do worse than take Dragon's Dawn for a whirl. The game world's neat and contains just about all you could want for a D&D or Game of Thrones-type gambling experience. Better still if you're scouting about for some scatter-paying action. Not that the options are thin for this sort of thing these days. Indeed, scatter pay slots are, in some ways, challenging Megaways in the ubiquity stakes. It's too bad no one patented the idea like Big Time Gaming did with its game engine. They'd be rolling in royalties by now.

Dragon's Dawn does it quite well, too, though there were a noticeable number of dead spins. Perhaps it's because some of the symbol values are quite high, and free spins triggered fairly often. Where Gate of Olympus and its horde of followers top out at 50x for 12+ of the highest-paying symbols, here they hit 200x. Providing another balancing act, the multiplier in Dragon's Dawn isn't as impressive as in some scatter pay slots, but you do get it in both phases of play, and it is not reliant on hitting multiplier symbols or anything like that. Chain wins together; build the multiplier, easy, in theory. This method, rather than using multiplier symbols, can create decent results as well, as attested by Dragon's Dawn's 7,500x the bet max win.

After returning from a land that's 'far far away from the earth', the trip wasn't too bad. Stakelogic has bothered to design a rich gaming world and has made a scatter-paying slot which avoids straight copying the top dogs of the genre like the previous one reviewed, TrueLab's slot Most Wanted. Both were decent scatter-paying slots, however, and Dragon's Dawn does its stuff a little bit differently, not majorly differently, but it's an alternative that may suit fantasy scatter buffs.