Dragon Horn (Thunderkick): Review

Dragon Horn is the newest addition to Thunderkick’s run of what you might call traditional slots, from a studio that defiantly continues to ignore the Megaways craze. And to be fair, their approach still works. Dragon Horn is a dependable game that taps into your primal side; the win potential is enticing, the maths feel well tuned, and the way the free spins feature ramps up is excellent.

Set in a medieval fantasy world, you’ll set off on an epic quest featuring elves, orcs and knights in this 5 reel, 243 ways to win slot from Thunderkick. With high volatility, it can be played from 10 cents to 100€/$ per spin on supported desktop computers, tablets and mobile devices. Dragon Horn includes a mystery symbol that changes into a random symbol, plus a multi-level bonus that carries you through 5 kingdoms on the road to the dragon’s lair, where serious riches are waiting.

Dragon Horn won’t win awards for cutting-edge visuals, but it presents itself with enough assurance that the straightforward look never feels like a drawback. The setting is a medieval town, and the reels show low-value red, blue, green, purple and brown shields, alongside mid-value orcs, dwarves, elves and knights. You’ll also spot queens and dragons, with dragons paying best—5 of a kind returns 20 times your stake. The wild is a large W symbol and replaces all symbols except the scatter, showing up on every reel except the first.

Dragon Horn (Thunderkick): Features

A special symbol in the game called the Dragon Fire symbol plays an important part, as you’ll soon notice. Its behaviour is straightforward and probably familiar—every Dragon Fire symbol that lands in view turns into a randomly selected character symbol, including the scatter, which can greatly boost the win potential.

The Dragon Fire symbol becomes even more valuable in the Bonus Game, activated by landing 3, 4 or 5 scatters anywhere on the reels, awarding 7, 9 or 11 free spins respectively. Once the feature begins, each scatter that appears in view advances the Dragon Horn meter by 1 and grants you +1 spin.

If you trigger it with 3 scatters, a map appears to show your progress to the next level. In addition, each time you move up a level, one of the shield symbols—starting with the lowest value—turns into a Dragon Fire symbol for the rest of the feature. In practice, this means all lower-value symbols can become mystery symbols, making it possible to hit wins of up to 8282 times your stake in the bonus.

Dragon Horn (Thunderkick): Verdict

Dragon Horn is a quintessential Thunderkick slot with impressive quality, delivering a strong adventure thanks to the escalating structure of the free spins bonus. Visually it may not be a jaw-dropping showpiece, but it has plenty of charm and does exactly what it needs to. The real appeal shows itself once you start spinning, as everything clicks—from the audiovisual package to the underlying mathematical model.

The potential is excellent and, even with its extreme volatility, we found it surprisingly forgiving. That said, it won’t protect you from the occasional barren stretch, as it’s possible to go 400+ spins between bonuses. All in all, we enjoyed our time with it, and if you want to test the waters of the win-all-ways style, Dragon Horn is certainly a solid place to start.