Lion's Pride Pokie Machine
Lion’s Pride is a 5-reel online pokie with 100 paylines which has an African wildlife theme that features several lions and a couple of unfortunate creatures that they are lining up for supper. It’s part of the Microgaming range, so can be found at the numerous sites which feature games from this popular and prolific developer.
A safari theme is nothing new, with lots of competing games having much the same style and theme, so Microgaming have added a couple of features that they hope will make Lion’s Pride stand out from the crowd, the main one being the 100 payline format that should help players to land lots of winning combinations. The pay-off from this is that those wins may be smaller, but we can’t have it all can we?
Off on Safari
The reels are set against a nice image of the African savanna at sunset, with a herd of elephants some deer and trees silhouetted against a deep red and orange sky. The game title and a pile of gold and precious jewels completes the picture. A bamboo frame runs around the reels and to finish it all off, there’s a set of control buttons at the bottom of the game which has been designed to fit in with the theme.
These buttons are there to set the amount wagered per spin, click to actually get the reels spinning and enter the gamble game if players want to have a go at multiplying the value of any win.
The amount bet is pretty limited, with players able to set coin values from 0.01 to 0.02 and play up to 500 coins which only equates to a maximum wager of 10.00 per spin. That’s low for an online pokie and makes this definitely a game for casual players rather than the more serious gamblers among us. All lines are permanently activated, so there’s no option to just try the game out with a micro-bet on just a line or so.
Lion's Pride
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Lower value symbols are made up of the high card 10, J, Q, K and A which appear on so many other pokies, but at least these have also been adapted to look part of the theme.
Wins are created when symbols land in a line running from the left side, with just 2 of the ’10’ symbol needed, while the others will need 3 across a payline to make up a winning combination. Symbols become animated when they are part of a winning line.
While the playing card symbols make up the lower end of the scale, higher value ones are also more interesting to look at, with a deer (springbok maybe?), a zebra and a lion cub all adding visual appeal to the proceedings.
The male lion and female lioness rightly take up positions as king and queen of the jungle and make up the highest value regular symbols.
Safari So Good?
Apart from that low bet range, it’s looking pretty good so far and there are several bonus features to help players get more from the game than just spinning the reels and seeing what happens. If the lion and lioness appear on a line they can substitute for each other and players will still get a payout, while the game logo is a wild symbol that will substitute for all except the scatter.
To boost the chances of it completing a winning line, the wild can be stacked one on top of another, with players potentially winning several payouts with a single spin if the stacked wild completes more than a single line at once.
There’s also a tribal mask scatter symbol which can stop in any positions on the reels to pay out a prize which will be multiplies of the total bet, not just the bet per line. Two scatters equal a 1x payout, while the maximum of 5 will be worth 100x. On top of this, 3 or more will take players into a free spins game that sees a random number of up to 25 spins play out, during which a multiplier of between 2x and 10x will apply to all wins.
If players like to take a risk, any win can be gambled up to 5 times over. To double the amount won, they just need to click the Gamble button and then correctly decide if a playing card will be red or black, while to quadruple it, they need to get the right suit.
The Verdict
Lion’s Pride has plenty of interesting features to keep players coming back again and again, but only the ones who are happy spending 10.00 or less per spin. That’s the major problem with this pokie, and the only real one, so if it’s not an issue, then no problem.