DRAGON HERO
Dragon Hero online slot produced by Pragmatic Play comes with a default 96.00% RTP and a 5-reel, 4-row playing area featuring 20 pay lines.
Ready for another trip to the Orient to look at the koi fish with a pretended delight and duck in fear before a terrifying floating dragon? You’re in the right place. The studio’s busy road map serves us yet again with a view every regular casino player has experienced countless times. This time, for some reason, we’re standing on a roof of a building in an Asian town, showered by cherry blossoms. In front of us, a red wooden frame decorated with golden patterns and sculptures of titular dragons, of which we’ll see much more once the feature and free spins roll in.
It’s challenging to muster feelings of admiration for such a setting, having seen literally hundreds of similar games with almost identical symbols and music. However, slots are only partly about the visuals, and an environment reused numerous times might still surprise and impress if it carries unique mechanics. Is that the case here? To answer that, we must meet the dragon a little closer.
DRAGON HERO
Dragon Hero online slot produced by Pragmatic Play comes with a default 96.00% RTP and a 5-reel, 4-row playing area featuring 20 pay lines.
Ready for another trip to the Orient to look at the koi fish with a pretended delight and duck in fear before a terrifying floating dragon? You’re in the right place. The studio’s busy road map serves us yet again with a view every regular casino player has experienced countless times. This time, for some reason, we’re standing on a roof of a building in an Asian town, showered by cherry blossoms. In front of us, a red wooden frame decorated with golden patterns and sculptures of titular dragons, of which we’ll see much more once the feature and free spins roll in.
It’s challenging to muster feelings of admiration for such a setting, having seen literally hundreds of similar games with almost identical symbols and music. However, slots are only partly about the visuals, and an environment reused numerous times might still surprise and impress if it carries unique mechanics. Is that the case here? To answer that, we must meet the dragon a little closer.
6/10
SLOT DETAILS
Provider:
PRAGMATIC PLAY
Layout:
5x4
Theme:
ASIAN
Pays:
20 PAY LINES
RTP:
96.00%
Bets:
0.20/100
SLOT FEATURES
Wild:
Jackpot:
Re-Spins:
Bonus Buy:
Multipliers:
Super Bet:
PLAY FOR REAL
How To Win On Dragon Hero Slot - Features & Mechanics
A few dozen spins, a glance at the pay table, and it's clear where we stand. The game offers a common way of scoring wins by landing 3 matching icons on one of the 20 lines starting from the leftmost reel. The paytable is quite extensive, with 5 symbols occupying the low-paying positions and 6 on the high end. Wins vary from 0.3 times the bet for the lowest paying set and up to 80x for a 5-of-a-kind hit on the most valuable one. The overall distribution puts a large gap between the highest hits and all the rest.
Super Wild
Nobody strained any muscles here regarding the naming of the feature, especially since it's the fundamental element of the slot, both in the base game and in the free spins. What's so super about it, then? Well, it won't sweep you off your feet, but watching it in action is pretty cool, so there's that. The golden dragon head lands with 3 distinct spots on its surface, which can be empty or carry a yin-yang image. It's puzzling to determine if the creators went deep and reached the paradoxical meaning of unity and duality, which would fit the Wild symbol's nature. Or they chose one of the most recognizable Asian icons and threw it on top of a dragon. Either way, once the golden serpent lands, it can carry from 1 to 3 Wilds and will release them onto random positions on the reels.
Dragon Hero Free Spins
At this point, we weren't even expecting any intricate way of triggering the bonus, and rightly so, since you need at least 3 Scatters in view to enter the free spins. The more you score, the more bonus wheels determining the number of spins you'll see prior to the actual round. Like in many other titles from the studio, each wheel can raffle a value between 1 and 3, so in the best scenario, you'll kick off with 30 spins.
Given that the Super Wild is the only feature in the game, it was easy to predict it would be empowered in the bonus round. Every time a golden dragon lands, it sticks to the screen and performs its action on every spin, releasing a Wild to a random spot. Initially, they always appear in the default state with only one yin-yang symbol highlighted, but with the help of Scatters, you have the opportunity to change that. Each hit of that special symbol will mark another empty container on the Super Wild, and once it does it the second time, the sticky dragon will start releasing 2 Wilds on every spin. The situation can repeat analogically to reach the Super Wild's full potential.
Dragon Hero On Mobile
The game presents a high-quality design throughout, and the same goes for the portable version. It's available in the latest HTML5 technology on all devices, making it a perfect in-and-out slot thanks to fast loading and smooth animations. Naturally, the landscape mode won't surprise much if you've already tried the game on a desktop, but the portrait view adds a spacious perspective with the stairs leading up to the reels and the roof of an Asian temple towering above the central area.
Final Thoughts
Dragon Hero can in no way be perceived as a peak of innovation or a breeze of fresh air, but perhaps it doesn't have to. Some studios approach each production with meticulous devotion, ensuring it's the absolute best they've ever made. Pragmatic Play is not one of them, and there's nothing wrong with that either because each industry needs variety. We live in a fast-paced world where trends change rapidly, and people get bored easily, so they constantly need something new to grasp their attention. That's what Dragon Hero is, in our opinion - a single blip on the online gambling radar. The entire Oriental package feels enjoyable, even though it comes in the same form as many others, but ultimately, none of the elements stick (except for the Super Wilds in free spins) with us or impress in any way. The excitement of the bonus round, which initially shows the potential of filling the entire screen with Wilds, quickly gives way to the monotony of a single, repetitive feature. Dragon Hero will probably not make any big waves, but we feel it wasn't even supposed to. It's here to catch the eye of some players who enjoy the simplicity of random and sticky Wilds in an Asian setting and will undoubtedly achieve that goal.