Kingdoms Rise: Forbidden Forest Slot by Playtech

Forbidden Forest is one of the fantasy entries in Playtech's Kingdoms Rise franchise, and it skips the usual grid for a stepped, varying-height reel layout that works out to 576 ways. A sword-wielding warrior tops the paytable at 200x for five of a kind, ahead of an elf archer, a sorceress and forest beasts, a panther and a bear, with coloured gems as the lows. A green tree-of-life medallion is the wild and covers everything except the owl.

The owl is the feature symbol, and it's the reason to play. Land one, two or three owls and you get 2, 4 or 12 respins, and every owl on the board turns into a roaming wild. These don't sit still: on each respin they fly to a new position, so a cluster of them shuffles across the reels for the length of the round, opening up different winning ways each time. Twelve respins from three owls with several roaming wilds in play is where this game builds its 11,520x max win, which is a serious ceiling for a Kingdoms Rise title.

It carries the full franchise metagame too. Tokens land during normal play, and you collect them to spend in the shared Feature Shop across any game in the series, plus there's a networked progressive jackpot that can hit on any spin. As always the progressive reads "Unavailable" in the free Playtech demo since it only pays for real money, so the demo is for learning the roaming-wild owl respins rather than chasing the jackpot.

With a 96.26% base RTP and high volatility, it's one of the better-value games in the series, the sort where the base game ticks over quietly until the owls land and the forest lights up. Worth a proper run of demo spins to trigger the respins at least once before you decide.