Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Overview

Long-time players may remember Dazzle Me as one of classic slot developer NetEnt’s earlier titles, later revisited with Dazzle Me Megaways a few years on. This time around, the Megaways mechanic has been swapped out for mistletoe, creating a seasonal holiday version. Called Dazzle Me Christmas, it brings back familiar Dazzle elements like Wild Reels, Linked Reels, and free spins, while also adding a newer multiplier twist, all neatly wrapped up.

Oddly enough, if you took away the mistletoe and hid the name, you’d struggle to pin down Dazzle Me Christmas’ festive theme. Visually, it closely mirrors the original, with the same hazy backdrop and gem-filled grid. The Elevate button near the stake controls is the clearest separator, giving Dazzle Me Christmas a modern bonus buy option that the first game didn’t have, but at a glance they’re still very similar.

A hallmark of the Dazzle series is its uneven reel layout. In Dazzle Me Christmas, the base game uses 5 reels set in a 3-3-4-4-5 row formation. With this setup, there are 76 ways to win, with combinations paying from the leftmost reel onward. While the overall win potential isn’t huge, the math model’s volatility is high, paired with a default RTP of 96.17% (two lower RTP versions are also offered). Betting is flexible, starting at 20 c per spin and reaching up to $/€200 per spin.

The paytable in Dazzle Me Christmas is fairly compact, featuring blue, green, purple, and pink gems as lower-value symbols, along with a bell and a 7 symbol for the higher payouts. Diamond symbols act as wilds, substituting for all reel symbols except scatter symbols.

Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Features

Dazzle Me Christmas includes Wild Reels, free spins with multiplier, Linked Reels, plus 4 Elevate Feature bonus buy options.

Wild Reels

Wild Reels may activate at random during the base game. When triggered, wilds land to cover entire reels, and up to 5 reels can turn into Wild Reels at the same time.

Free Spins

Landing 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols awards 8, 12, or 16 free spins. Scatters can carry multipliers based on which reel they land on – x2 on reel 2, x3 on reel 3, x4 on reel 4, and x5 on reel 5. If at least 3 scatters land, these multipliers are added together.

During free spins, the reels expand to 5 rows high, and a multiplier is applied. This multiplier starts at x1 unless it was increased by scatter symbols in the base game. The win multiplier increases by +1 after every winning spin. If 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols appear again, the feature retriggers and adds an extra 8, 12, or 16 free spins to the total, respectively. Linked Reels only operate in free spins: at the beginning of each free spin, adjacent reels 1-2 or 3-4 link together, with the right reel copying the left reel.

Elevate Feature

The Elevate Feature lets players purchase bonuses. Available options are: Scatter Hunt – boosts the chance of triggering free spins for 2x the bet, Wild Reels – every spin guarantees at least 1 Wild Reel plus a random multiplier of x1 to x50, which multiplies the spin win and can be added to the free spins multiplier if free spins trigger. The cost is 10x the bet, Free Spins – 100x the bet to trigger free spins with 3 to 5 scatters, and Enhanced Free Spins – 300x the bet to trigger free spins with 3 to 5 scatters, and at least 1 scatter will have a multiplier of x2 to x5.

Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Verdict

When reviewing a slot, the takeaway usually lands on one side or the other – good or bad. With Dazzle Me Christmas, it’s worth starting with what it does well before getting into the drawbacks. For one, it’s connected to a title that’s almost 10 years old (at the time of review), so players with some history might get a hit of nostalgia from Dazzle Me Christmas. It keeps much of the same visual style and several familiar mechanics, so with a bit of imagination, it can feel like revisiting an earlier era for another shot at luck. It’s also enjoyable to see features from earlier Dazzle games combined, like Linked Reels and Wild Reels, then strengthened by a new free spins multiplier. The win potential is also higher than the original release.

That said, the ceiling still isn’t particularly impressive, topping out at 2,306x the bet, which is roughly 3 times higher than Dazzle Me but far below Dazzle Me Megaways. More skeptical players might even feel that while Dazzle Me Christmas isn’t a slapdash effort, it comes across as a bit underpowered for a studio like NetEnt. In the end, Dazzle Me Christmas isn’t among the most festive slots ever made, but it can work as a light throwback, and though it sparkles in places, it feels more like a small stocking stuffer than one of those big, mysterious presents under the tree everyone’s trying to figure out.