Dragon Shard (Stormcraft Studios): Review

5 by 5 grid slots don’t get away with being merely average. For a game in this format to satisfy players, it has to bring something genuinely distinctive and engaging. From Microgaming partners Stormcraft Studios comes Dragon Shard, a realm of mystery and magic that’s oddly constrained by an uninspiring set of 40 paylines. It’s a baffling and irritating choice because, honestly, when even 5×3 slots can dish out 243 ways to win, limiting this to just 40 feels absurd.

Dragon Shard is a fantasy slot built on the Fortunium engine, a futuristic steam-punk style game released in 2018 that quickly disappeared from the spotlight. Here, instead of mechanical marvels, you’re dropped into an equally unusual world filled with mythical beasts and powerful heroes. With stakes ranging from 5 cents up to 200 Euros per spin, it includes a Win Booster feature, Mystery Symbols, and Free Spins that can deliver up to 3 mystery reels on each spin.

Taking place in a fictional universe, Dragon Shard looks polished and is visually more appealing than its counterpart Fortunium. Reel symbols feature the lower-paying spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs, alongside premium icons like the Dragon Shard, Ice Dragon, Fire Dragon, plus the King and Queen. The last two land fully stacked on the reels and also pay the most, awarding 8 times your total stake for 5 on a full payline. The wild is the Dragon Shard logo, and it returns 20 times your stake for 5 of a kind.

Dragon Shard (Stormcraft Studios): Features

Dragon Shard includes a Mystery Symbol feature that can trigger during play. Whenever these symbols land, they convert into one randomly selected symbol across the reels, with the wild also being a possible outcome.

Before you get going, you’ll need to choose whether or not to enable the Win Booster feature. If you leave it off, the game behaves in the standard way, paying wins from left to right. If you switch the Win Booster on, you’ll receive payouts both left to right and right to left. This comes at a price, though—activating it costs 2 times your stake (the 100€ max stake becomes increased to 200€). In addition, with Win Booster active, Mystery Symbols will only change into high-value symbols or wilds, which boosts the overall potential considerably.

A slot wouldn’t feel complete without a Free Spins feature—something Stormcraft notably left out of their previous release, Agent Jane Blonde Returns. This time it’s included, and it triggers when you land 3 or more scatter symbols anywhere on the reels. You begin with 10 free spins and gain access to Mystery Reels. Activating the bonus with 3, 4, or 5 scatters awards 1, 2, or 3 Mystery Reels to start, respectively. These reels, which only appears on reels 2, 3 and 4, are filled entirely with mystery symbols on every spin. Wins of up to 800x are possible on a single spin, but that would mean hitting a full screen of wilds, which is very unlikely.

Dragon Shard (Stormcraft Studios): Verdict

Dragon Shard is a reasonably balanced medium variance slot with solid visuals, but it doesn’t offer much beyond that. That’s the polite version. The honest reaction is: how can they expect players to accept this. With so many options available (they are developers, after all), they chose to replicate one of the blandest slots ever made. Yes, it looks a little more polished than the original, but that hardly matters when it’s essentially the same repetitive game with the same laughable payouts.