Mystery of LongWei Slot – Free Demo

The Dragon that drops down reel one

A Dragon lands on reel 1, turns what it covers into Mystery symbols, then drops one space down the reel on the next spin, and it keeps going for as long as any Dragon is still in view. iSoftBet is a London based game supplier that ships a range of half decent games that undoubtedly looks fine. The Dragon is the only symbol tied to one reel, and reel 1 is where every one of those sequences starts. It delivers little to no thrill, in my view at least. My own run through it lasted 210 spins, the longest stretch without a win being 16 of them, ending on spin 62.

So what about Mystery of LongWei then? At 4.00 a spin that came to 840.00 put through the game. It's a 5 reel slot on 40 fixed paylines, the most standard configuration there is, and a spin costs 40 times the selected coin value. I ran it on a 0.10 coin value, which is where the 4.00 stake comes from. So nothing fresh under the sun here. Pay table values are quoted in coins and multiplied by the coin value, so they move with that dial rather than with the total bet.

Visually the action unfolds in a Chinese legend, overseen by a Dragon that appears on the first reel, and blending dragons with mystery symbols is well-worn for sure. The Scatter is a pagoda and it pays from anywhere in view rather than along a line. It doesn't demand much of you. At rest it is a plain 5x3 view with the lines that paid ticked off at the side. It's a colourful journey at least. The Wild turns up in the middle of reel 3 often enough, standing in for the paying symbols on either side of it.

What the pagodas and the Dragon each start

There are low-value symbols and high-value symbols, plus a Wild, a Scatter and the Dragon. The highs are the phoenix, tiger, panda, lotus, koi and gold pot, and the lows are the card ranks from 9 up to the ace.

In terms of mechanics it's fairly straight forward. There is no ways-pay wrinkle and no cluster count to build; a line either fills from reel 1 or it does not. Wins pay left to right with the Scatters excepted, only the highest win per line pays, and the Wild substitutes for everything except the Scatter and the Dragon. So a Wild sitting beside a Dragon does nothing for it.

There's a base game feature called Dragon Colossal Spins, and when triggered by a Dragon landing on reel 1, it will award up to 4 colossal-symbol respins, the feature lasting for as long as a Dragon is still in view. Any single Dragon on reel 1 is enough to start it, with no meter to fill first. The Dragons reveal Mystery symbols and drop one space per spin. Four is therefore a ceiling rather than a promise, because the sequence stops the moment the last Dragon drops out of view.

There is no retrigger. The free spins are the other feature, and the pagodas are what start them. Three, four or five Scatters award 10, 20 or 30 free spins, during which the high-paying symbols become colossal on reels 2 to 5. Reel 1 is the one that stays at normal size while that runs.

Two places for a colossal symbol

It's difficult to say who was first with the colossal symbols idea. iSoftBet has put theirs in two places here, the base game respins and the free spins round. It has been around long enough that it's not a total surprise to see one from iSoftBet as well. Raging Dragons and Book of Cai Shen are two more iSoftBet titles on the site.

There's a wrinkle to their take on the colossal idea in the Dragon that strolls down reel 1. Where it lands decides how long the sequence lasts, since it moves down a row at a time until it is gone. That is nice to see, but personally, I would have preferred higher win potential to go with it, and a 1,000x max win simply doesn't cut it when the free spins don't retrigger. The round runs its 10, 20 or 30 and stops there. The round can finish before it has really begun. Nothing carries between one free spin and the next either, beyond the colossal symbols on reels 2 to 5.

In my case, 210 spins at a 4.00 credit stake yielded 218.80 of the 840.00 I ran through it - 26% - with the balance never once rising back above the 1,000.00 I began with. Sixty of the 210 paid something, and 47 of those 60 came back with less than the 4.00 they cost. The best single spin was worth 10x the stake, and not a single free spins round in the lot. That was spin 87 at 40.00, and the next best was spin 134 at 15.20, or 3.8x. I'd be glad to sprinkle some unicorn dust on this piece should I ever see that trigger. Three pagodas anywhere in view is all it takes to start it, and the Dragon on reel 1 runs on a separate one.

Minty Slots Verdict: My 210 spins returned 218.80 of the 840.00 they cost, 26%, and three pagodas never landed together in the whole run. The Dragon on reel 1 is the only part of this machine that behaves unusually, and it awards at most four respins before it drops off the bottom of the grid; behind the pagodas the free spins round runs its 10, 20 or 30 and there is no way back into it once the count is spent.