Smoking Dragon Hacksaw Gaming slot review with free demo

Smoking Dragon is an Asian-themed online slot. The game has a cartoonish style with the main character being a friendly dragon who blows smoke from a pipe and controls the clouds. The main feature of Smoking Dragon is an unconventional avalanche (cascade) system that’s tied to the bottom row of the grid rather than to specific winning symbols. Dragon Egg symbols can land on the reels, sometimes even with multipliers. If you manage to collect 3 eggs at once as a result of one spin and subsequent cascades, you instantly receive a fixed prize – 500x your bet. As for free spins, what we have – Trial of the Dragon (3 FS): Standard free spins with an increased chance of Wild multipliers. Song of the Dragon (4 FS): A mode where Wild symbols become “sticky” or have higher multipliers. Smoking Dragon (5 FS): The rarest mode with the highest payout potential, where the cascade and multiplier mechanics operate at their limit. Wild symbols – Wilds substitute for any standard symbols. In Smoking Dragon they often come with multipliers (for example, x2, x5, x10) that multiply together if several Wilds participate on the same line. Liked the cascade system. Row-based clearing of the grid gives a better chance for chain reactions than regular avalanches. The instant 500x prize for eggs is a good alternative to paid bonus buys. Didn’t like that due to low volatility big multipliers in the base game come rarely, everything piles up for the free spins, and even there it can be blank. Overall a fun little slot to kill an evening or two, nothing more.

Smoking Dragon is a video slot from the provider Hacksaw Gaming.

With this newcomer they started adding the option to buy the hotmod. In my opinion, not a very good idea. The hotmod was always something unattainable, and if you hit it you were almost guaranteed a big hit. Now you can buy it, and in these slots the hotmod became a regular top bonus. We all remember how adding bonus buys ended at Endorphina. The provider just went downhill, now I even notice that in my beloved Hacksaw.

There are three types of bonus rounds. The regular one for three scatters, the top one for four, and the hotmod for five. In the simple bonus, besides wilds appearing, golden eggs can also drop. One or two of them do nothing, but if you catch 3 eggs at the same time you get a x500 win from the bet. There are two types of wilds, red and gold. They come with multipliers from x2 to x100. The red has a fixed multiplier, while if the gold lands “on top” it will move down after each hit and its multiplier will double. In the top bonus wilds also drop and there’s a multiplier progress bar. After every 10 hits the bar fills, and the minimum multiplier on the wilds will increase. The mechanic is painfully simple: catch hits, fill the bar, and then just wait for good lines with wild x100. The hotmod is basically the same top bonus, only here the minimum multiplier is x5 and each spin guarantees 1 wild.

In the regular bonus the best wins were no more than x100, while in the top one there were times close to x1000. I never caught the hotmod. The spins really keep the balance very well, thanks to this cascade-win mechanic and low volatility.

Smoking Dragon

Cartoony slot with a Chinese theme, visually an acquired taste but not off-putting. Volatility is listed as low, but it feels more like medium, maybe even medium-high – the balance holds up fine, but if you start buying bonus features the bankroll melts noticeably. Gameplay is a bit drawn-out; watching cascades, long and tiny wins gets boring after a while. Everything is built around wilds – dragons: there’s a regular one and an epic one (both multiply up to x100), the difference being that the epic doubles after each win. So for a big hit you need to catch top symbols (covered by closed lines) together with multiplier-dragons over several spins. In the base game it’s unrealistic to catch something like that on a spin, payouts are small, but there’s a chance to land three pineapples and get x500 at once. In the bonus free spins these mechanics develop further: in the normal mode the chance to hit dragon-wilds and pineapples is increased, in the top mode the chance is even higher, plus there’s a minimum multiplier bar that levels up during wins, and in the epic mode wilds are guaranteed and the minimum multiplier starts at x5, plus leveling goes much faster and by the end of the bonus, with good play, it usually levels to about x25. I recommend the extra chance here – thanks to it I hit an epic bonus at x2000+, and overall bonuses come noticeably easier. Max win is stated as x10000, but given the mechanics you’d need top-level hits multiplied by a pumped multiplier; on a cold spin you won’t hit that. The slot is decent, but won’t appeal to many.