Developer Mancala Gaming has made a bunch of interesting slots, but this one – Spirit of the Lake online slot – immediately struck me as having an extremely high-quality presentation. Of course, it’s not without its quirks; this is a low volatility slot, so if you are looking for truly enormous wins, you should probably look elsewhere. Low volatility doesn’t automatically mean bad but stay tuned if you can accept a maximum win of 690x your bet. As for other vital statistics, this is a 20 fixed payline game with the familiar 95% RTP that seems common to all Mancala games.
Spirit of the Lake utilises a larger than average 4×5 grid, so the twenty paylines don’t end up feeling like twenty as a result. The primary special feature is a free spins bonus round which can award up to 100 free spins with a multiplier of up to x5. The free spins bonus also includes a secondary “Big Bonus Gun” feature, which can enhance your winnings even further.
Do you fancy giving the game a try for yourself? Our free demo slot of Spirit of the Lake is available to play below:
| Provider | Mancala Gaming |
| Reels | 5 |
| Rows | 4 |
| Paylines | 20 |
| Bonus Rounds | 1 |
| Bet Range | 0.20 - 18 |
| Volatility | Low |
| Max Win | 690x |
| Bonus Buy | No |
| RTP | 95.00% |
| Our Rating | 7.4 |
Spirit Of The Lake Slot Casino Bonuses
Spirit Of The Lake Slot Free Play
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Spirit Of The Lake Slot Theme, Stakes, Pays & Symbols
The name “spirit of the lake” made me think this would probably be a Merlin or Avalon-themed game, but this is not the case. The title may well be inspired by the Lady of the Lake part of the King Arthur legends, but that is as far as it goes. As for the rest of the presentation, such as the symbols, they are filled with cute-looking animals – without wanting to sound sexist, I’d imagine this game is more likely to appeal to female players than men. Check it out yourself if you disagree!
Over to the paytable, we find a squirrel chilling out on a leaf as the highest-paying symbol with a return of 25x your bet for five-of-a-kind. The frog takes second place, paying 12.5x for all five, whilst a fly holding a golden ring is third with a return of 10x your bet for a full winning payline. Surprisingly, these are the only three “major” symbols on the entire paytable – there are three lower-paying symbols, too, as well as the wild and scatter symbols which have no payout attached to them whatsoever.
I’ve noticed another pattern with Mancala’s games, too, this time when it comes to the betting ranges – the maximum bet always seems to be 90x the minimum bet per spin. In the Spirit of the Lake slot game, this translates to a minimum wager of €0.20 and a maximum of €18.00, which look like healthy numbers to me.
Base Game & Modifiers
The base game takes place on a 5×4 playfield, larger than the typical 5×3 playfield used by many other online slots. This is fine, although I did find the 20 fixed paylines felt a tad insufficient for such a large grid. After spinning the game for a while, I wondered what was going on with the scatter symbol. Every time I hit two of them, the game would do the familiar “fast spin” of the remaining reels whilst waiting to see if a third scatter would appear, but it didn’t seem to make a difference either way. It turns out that you need to hit the scatters several times to win a bonus in Spirit of the Lake – see the bonus rounds section for details.
Crystal Multiplier
The wild symbol only appears during the base game, but it has a secondary purpose that isn’t immediately clear when you begin to play the game. If three or more wild symbols land on a single spin, it will increase your “Crystal Multiplier” up to a maximum of 5x. This crystal multiplier does not take effect until you get to the bonus round. At this point, all your winnings will automatically be boosted by whatever value you managed to reach before triggering the feature.
Spirit Of The Lake Slot Free Spins Feature
The Spirit of the Lake paytable indicates that winning up to 100 free spins in this game is possible, but I think that may be stretching the truth somewhat! I say this because you need to hit three or more scatters ten times to trigger the bonus round; three scatters give you one free spin, four gets you three spins, whilst five awards the maximum of ten spins. You would need to hit ten consecutive five scatter triggers in a row to get a total of 100 spins, and I never even got one of them when I was testing this game.
It can take a while to get here, as you might expect, considering that you need to hit ten lots of scatter symbols to trigger the bonus round, but don’t worry – the scatters are a lot more common than they are in most other games!
During the free spins, the entire third reel is covered by the spirit of the lake, which acts as a stacked wild symbol for the duration of the feature. You’ll see the wild and scatter symbols flying by during this part of the game, but only regular symbols can ever land – there is no chance of any retriggers, I’m afraid.
What you do have is a “Big Bonus Gun” or BBG sub-feature – this is activated whenever a winning payline of the three “major” symbols lands and effectively doubles the value of every winning combination.
I played around a dozen bonus rounds whilst I was testing this game and seemed to average around 50x my bet per feature, with a couple of higher outliers along the way. That may not sound like much, but I did come out in front by quite a long way by the end of the session, making this an acceptable low-volatility game.
Spirit Of The Lake Slot Review Final Thoughts
At first, I wasn’t sure what to make of Spirit of the Lake, but I soon began to find the game fun and exciting. It’s a shame that the maximum win isn’t a little bit higher, but I’m a sucker for high volatility games, and that is probably why my bankroll never seems to go far enough! If you can stomach the cutesy theme, you should try this one – it’s surprisingly great fun.
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