Lightning Gorilla Slot – Free Demo

A 2022 cabinet with 40 fixed lines

Lightning Gorilla was launched on March 9, 2022 by Lightning Box Games. I put 350 spins through it at a 2.00 stake, 700.00 wagered against 314.40 returned, and the balance finished at 614.40. It is a studio that has been placing its name on cabinet-style slots for years. Its own back catalogue includes Lightning Leopard from 2019, another 40-line game, and the 20-line Stellar Cash Chicken Fox 5x Skillstar from 2023.

In any case, Lightning Gorilla is a 5-reel, 3-row game. Each line pays only its highest combination, and wins on separate lines are added together. It has 40 fixed paylines, and they pay left to right from the leftmost reel. The Scatter Lightning Bolt is the exception, and pays from anywhere on the reels. The game revolves around one character - the gorilla (not that anyone will mind).

What five Gorillas are worth

The highest paying symbol is the Gorilla. It returns 300 for five of a kind at a 1 credit bet. Below it come the Sloth, the Jaguar, the Toucan and the Frog, and then the card ranks A, K, Q and J.

The wild symbol does what wild symbols do, standing in for everything except the Scatter, and is worth 600x the line bet for 5 across a payline, while the Scatter symbol comes in the form of a lightning bolt.

The bolts that count and the ones that do not

The Lightning Respin enters play when 6 or more scatters land anywhere across the reels. Those triggering bolts carry their own prize values, but they are not paid out until the respin has finished. It grants 3 respins, and every bolt that is collected during the feature resets the respins back to 3. The whole feature is played at the bet that triggered it. Further - between 1 and 5 reels are active on each respin. Active reels are surrounded by electricity and the rest are dimmed. Only bolts landing on those active reels are collected. A bolt that lands on a dimmed reel does nothing: it is not collected and it does not reset the counter either. Colossal 2x2 and 3x3 Jackpot and Lightning Bolt symbols break into separate prizes. Where a Colossal Lightning Bolt lands only partly on an active reel, only the prizes inside the active reels are collected. The Mini, Minor, Major and Grand jackpots are fixed rather than progressive: at the 2.00 stake I played they read 5.00, 50.00, 250.00 and 2,500.00. They are not multiplied by the bet multiplier either, so a higher bet multiplier instead either raises the chance of a jackpot or raises the prizes themselves. Each one is winnable more than once in the same respin. A Colossal Jackpot symbol splits into several individual jackpots by itself. When the respins expire, prizes and jackpots are paid to the win meter. Paytable prizes are not paid during the respin.

Final Minty Score: The label says 96.18% and 350 spins handed back 44.9% of what I staked, with the one Lightning Respin carrying 15% of that return. Whether the feature is where the rest of the theoretical return lives is not something a run this size settles.

One respin in 350 spins

Lightning Gorilla caps out at 2,500x the max bet in a single game. The longest stretch I had without a paying spin was 19, ending on spin 67.

I'm struggling a bit to grasp why the respin is buried behind 6 scatters. 104 of my 350 spins paid something, and 64 of those paid back less than the 2.00 stake. Across my 350 spins I observed it exactly once, on spin 323, and it paid 46.00 at a 2.00 stake. The next two largest wins were 22.00 on spin 330 and 17.60 on spin 288. That was 15% of everything I won on a session that returned 44.9% and never once rose back above the balance I began with.