Lantern Festival is both an online and brick and mortar slot that was developed by William Interactive Gaming. The slot is a relatively modern one, with 3Dish graphics but pretty basic special features. The game can be found all over the world on casino floors as well as on both mobile and online casinos. Lantern Festival can be played on a range of mobile devices such as smart phones and even smart watches, or on a desktop or laptop computer. It can be downloaded via either casino content or via an app store as a standalone game.

Lantern Festival can be played for up to five coins per line, with a maximum bet of 200 coins. This makes the slot fall into the penny slot category, and its features and graphics help it to be a solid middle of the road one at that. The game is a low variance title, which means that there are many small wins, but you don’t get much from them.

Graphics and Feel

Lantern Festival is a pretty good looking slot, but not outstanding. The game has lots of bright colours, mostly oranges and yellows and reds indicative of the flame that lights the lanterns of the games name. The reels are set in a Chinese temple with a red and purple sky behind them. The reels themselves are taken up entirely by block style symbols, also done in bright colours. To the bottom right of the reels is a Chinese girl in a boat that looks provocatively at you.

Festival Feel and Theme

At the beginning of the Chinese New year a Lantern Festival is held where hundreds of brightly coloured paper lanterns are released into the air. Lantern Festival the slot plays on this theme by using Asian inspired symbols and features. Unfortunately WMS did not go the whole way and make all of the symbols theme based, and thus the bottom of the range ones are from a deck of poker cards that has very little to do with the Chinese New Year. The rest of the symbols are a bit better with golden rams, Chinese letters, tea cups, a pretty Chinese girl and of course paper lanterns all gracing the reels.

Festive Features

Lantern Festival has a few special features including a wild symbol, free spins and extreme symbol. The wild is a golden and red dragon and will replace all other symbols in the game except for the scatter and extreme ones.  This dragon can appear stacked on the reels that means that it covers more than one reel at a time.

The fireworks scatter will grant a player with free spins as well as scatter payouts depending on how many of them have been fund anywhere on the reels. The free spins are played out on a whole new set of reels, with 8 symbols per reel instead of four. This also ups the paylines to 80 instead of forty, for no extra charge.

Extreme Symbols

This is a clever little invention of WMS to increase winning combinations both in the base pokies online New Zealand game as well as the free spins. There are eight of these symbols which match and show up stacked on top of each other. These land quite often, if not all eight then at least two of them which greatly increases your chances of winning combinations.