Bjorn Slot Review

I recently spent some time playing Thunderkick's Bjorn, an 8x8 cluster-pays slot set in a moody Norse forest (due for release on 9 October 2026). The whole game revolves around a really cool concept: a hero character who actually walks around the grid hunting specific symbols to build up a global multiplier. It's a neat visual that makes the gameplay feel a bit more dynamic than your standard grid slot.

Triggering the bonus is a bit unusual. Instead of needing a set number of scatters, a single hammer scatter gives you a "lottery" draw at the end of a cascade. If it misses, it just stays on the board as a dead symbol. It's an interesting approach, but it can be a little frustrating.

You can speed things up with the Bet+ options Bonus Boost, Bonus Boost Plus and Bonus Boost Extreme, paying 1.5x, 3.5x, or 12x your stake to boost your trigger chances by 2x, 5x, or 20x. Statistically, the 12x option gives you the best bang for your buck regarding odds, but a scatter can still fail its draw. At 12x a spin, a failed draw is an expensive miss. If you prefer to skip the grind, there is no feature buy, but the Bet+ Bonus Game mode costs 150x your bet and makes every spin a bonus.

Once you're in the bonus, you get five free spins and one to three random abilities. This is where the game gets fun. After a cascade, the hero steps off his platform and walks over any remaining "Draugr" symbols to destroy them. Each kill boosts your global multiplier and can drop a coin worth up to 5x. That multiplier then boosts every winning cluster and coin for that spin.

The downside is that the multiplier resets to x1 on every single free spin, so you have to rebuild it from scratch each time. Thankfully, your kill meter and abilities do carry over. If you manage to collect 20 Draugr, you get two extra spins and more abilities.

I paid 150x for one spin of the Bonus Game mode. I ended up making back a little under two-thirds of my cost, which isn't terrible for a volatile slot. Because the base symbol payouts are pretty low, you really have to rely on that multiplier to do the heavy lifting. I had one great spin where the hero hunted enough Draugr to hit a 10x multiplier, turning a basic bush cluster into a nice 39x win. Naturally, the round ended with my kill meter at 19/20, just one short of a retrigger. Classic slot experience, right?

If you're familiar with Thunderkick, Bjorn sits next to the studio's two other cluster games, Greedy Pumpking, due on 21 October, and Shark Park, due on 13 November. Those two are on a 7-column grid and boast a 10,000x max win, whereas Bjorn caps at a more modest 5,000x. The mechanics differ, too: those two use wild multipliers that have to sit inside winning clusters, while Bjorn applies its global multiplier to everything. On the plus side, Bjorn's 94.22% RTP is slightly higher than its studio neighbors.

From another studio, the closest match is ELK Studios' Propaganda 2, due on 22 October, since both build a global multiplier during a spin. However, Propaganda 2 doesn't reset its multiplier between free spins and has a far bigger 25,000x max win, making Bjorn feel a bit tame by comparison.

Bjorn is a highly atmospheric game with a genuinely fun walking-hero mechanic. The resetting multiplier and the lottery-style bonus trigger might turn some players off, but if you like cluster games that require a bit of build-up for a payoff, it's definitely worth a few spins.