Treasures of Lion City Online Slot Machine – Free Play & Review

The theme of Treasures of Lion City comes from the history of China. It started out as a powerful and ancient city of the country, founded some time before 200 AD. It was flooded, as the government of China decided to built a dam in the region, and now it’s the equivalent of Atlantis, just in East Asia. Symbols give you warriors, helmets, chests, elixirs, crystals and several Royals.

Developer

The game is exclusive to Microgaming, but it’s coming from a partner studio, called Pulse 8 Studios. Quite a few games have been entering the company’s collection this way lately, and Pulse 8 seems to be doing a particular good job developing slots for Microgaming, just based on what we’ve seen so far from them.

How To Play It

The game’s requirement is to invest a minimum of $0.25 into the next round, as that’s going to be enough to cover all available lines, sending $0.01 to each one. The range goes higher than that though, and at its maximum, you can spend $50 for a single spin. This would give you line bets of up to $2.

With Treasures of Lion City, you get a 5-reel slot which has 25 paylines. There aren’t a lot of configurations which are more common than this one, so that part is easy. Some extra features insure that the game is going to be fun to play, but there is nothing inside that you wouldn’t get in another slot.

Special Features

One of the more fun features that slot machines have been offering in the last couple of years, the Rolling Reels work to improve already profitable rounds, as you can’t trigger them if you don’t have at least one combo formed. The winning symbols always get removed through this feature, so that others can come in. Additional improvements happen, as you get more and more cascades of symbols as part of the same initial paid spin.

At first, you get various symbols turned into extra wilds (Elixir after 1^st cascade, Helmet after 3^rd, Gold Chest after 5^th), but then you advance to getting higher multipliers for your next wins as well (3x after 7^th cascade, 9x after 9^th and 27x after 11^th). The potential is awesome at this point, much higher in fact than the level at which the game was capped.

Gold Lion wilds are among the features that you can take advantage of, and of course it will be a substitute which can participate in the formation of all sorts of winning combinations. Even its own wins are a possibility, if at least two wilds appear left to right, on one of the lines.

Maximum Payouts

Treasures of Lion City pays a decent enough chunk of cash, with 2,600x returns on the wager, and up to $130,000 paid for a single very lucky spin. I’d call that a payout level to be happy with, particularly for a slot machine which is advertised as having Medium volatility.

While everything else so far sounds good, the Return to Player percentage is at a level that will make most players stay away. With just 94.20% of wagers returning to players as winnings, it’s way below the average of 96% that most would consider barely acceptable. By far, it’s the biggest downside I see with this game.

Summary

Treasures of Lion City looks like a decent enough game for the most part, though its impressive features are coupled with fairly low top payouts, and that’s already one downside. It gets worse when you check out the game’s RTP though, since at 94.20% it’s one of the worst I’ve seen for a new online slot lately.