Northern Temple Slot Review

Every win destroys the symbols that made it, fresh ones fall into the gaps, and each of those falls adds a row across the top. Three rows becomes four, four becomes five, five becomes six, and the chain runs until a drop lands with nothing. Ways are rows to the power of five, so the count steps 243, 1,024, 3,125, 7,776. Survive three drops and the number of ways has been multiplied by thirty-two.

Which is why the payouts look worse than they play. The best symbol pays 10x for five of a kind, feeble on paper. On the opening 243-way board, covering every position with it pays 2,430x. Do the same on a six-row board and it is 7,776 x 10x, or 77,760x, more than twelve times what this game will actually hand over, and that is before the win multiplier has touched a thing. The 6,258x cap is not a distant theoretical figure here. It is a wall the mechanic can run into, and it is doing far more work than the shallow table of payouts suggests.

Worth keeping straight: the whole grid is cleared and refilled at the start of each spin, so the height drops back to three rows every time.

A win multiplier sits in the blue stone above the reels and rises by 1 with every drop, from x1, with no ceiling written into it. In the main game it is erased at the start of each spin. In free spins it is kept, spin after spin, for the entire round.

Follow that through and the shape of the game appears. A good base-game chain of three drops peaks at x4 and then it is gone. Fifteen free spins averaging a couple of drops apiece finish somewhere near x30, and every win and every Coin value late in that round is being multiplied by whatever has piled up. The last few spins of a bonus are worth several times what the first few were. It also means a retrigger is worth far more than the original trigger was, because the extra fifteen spins arrive on top of the accumulated figure instead of restarting at x1.

Coins land on any reel in both modes and behave unlike anything else on the board: once one shows up mid-chain it sticks there until the wins stop. If three or more are still sitting on the reels when the drops end, each turns over a hidden value, those values are multiplied by the current win multiplier and added together, and the total is paid.

The wiring is the clever part. One long chain does two jobs at once, growing the grid so more coins can fit on it and raising the number those coins are about to be multiplied by. A four-drop chain that ends with four coins on a six-row board is where this game's best moments live. Evoplay does not publish the range the coin values are drawn from and the game does not show it either, so the size of that payout stays unknown until it lands.

Three Scatters award 15 free spins. So do four. So do five. The count makes no difference at all, which turns a five-Scatter landing into a piece of luck the game quietly throws away. Scatters only appear on reels 2, 3 and 4, so a trigger always builds from the middle of the board outward. Land three more inside the round and another 15 spins are added.

The Wild substitutes for everything except Scatters and Coins, and it never lands on reel 1. Since wins have to start on the leftmost reel and run rightward, reel 1 has to produce the paying symbol itself every single time, which strips away a large part of what a Wild is normally for. It can keep a combination going. It cannot start one.

Evoplay shipped Northern Temple Bonus Buy four weeks after this one: same grid, same symbols, same features, same 6,258x cap. The pricing is the unusual part. Both editions run a 96.06% base RTP, so nothing at all is taken away for having the button, which is not how this studio's pairs normally work (Lucky Porker sheds 0.02 of a point for its buy, The Greatest Catch gives up 0.11). The buy is a single option, 54x total bet for 15 free spins at 96.00%, costing 0.06 of a point and working out to 3.6x per free spin.