Whilst many developers are content to release just one Christmas—themed slot each year, Pragmatic Play seems determined to pummel us into submission with a veritable flood of Santa-style slotting. Today we’ll be checking out the developer’s new Starlight Christmas online slot, a festive update of their popular Starlight Princess machine released in 2022. This scatter-pays game awards wins for eight or more matching symbols anywhere on the playfield and shares the same 96.50% RTP and 5,000x jackpot as the original game.
The feature set looks eerily familiar too, so I’m reasonably sure that the game is just a Christmas re-skinning of Starlight Princess rather than a genuine sequel. The base game utilises tumbling symbols along with multipliers to produce some huge wins, but the main event is undoubtedly the free spins feature, where multipliers are held in between spins. Pragmatic Play has included a bonus bet option and a bonus buy facility, which should please the more impatient players reading this review… provided those features aren’t prohibited in your region, of course!
If like myself, you had long forgotten about Starlight Princess, this game provides the perfect excuse to re-familiarise yourself. For those who never played the original, that’s even more of a reason to fire up our free demo slot of Starlight Christmas – available to play below:
| Provider | Pragmatic Play |
| Reels | 6 |
| Rows | 5 |
| Paylines | Scatter Pays |
| Bonus Rounds | 1 |
| Bet Range | 0.20 - 100 |
| Volatility | High |
| Max Win | 5,000x |
| Bonus Buy | Yes |
| RTP | 96.50% |
| Our Rating | 8.0 |
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Starlight Christmas Demo Slot
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Theme, Stakes, Pays & Symbols
We’d all love to be a princess, wouldn’t we? Well, a prince, I mean, obviously. But we can’t always get what we want, so it’s nice of Pragmatic Play to create games such as Starlight Princess to give us a small taste of what it might be like… all you have to do is win the jackpot a few times, and away you go. If prince or princess isn’t quite grand enough for you, don’t worry – you could always spin Egyptian King instead for an even more royal experience! Slot developers really do think of everything, don’t they?
All of the symbols used in the original Starlight Princess make another appearance here in Starlight Christmas, and whilst the payouts have not changed, they do at least have a little snow accumulating on them, potentially increasing their value by some amount. The snow seems a little arbitrary, though, so I’ll stick to their paytable values for the sake of this review! The Sun and Heart Charms take the top spot with a return of 50x your bet for 12 or more symbols anywhere on the grid, while the Moon Charm will pay you 15x your bet for 12 or more symbols. The final high-paying symbol is the Star Charm, with a maximum return of 12x your bet. There are also five lower-paying symbols represented by gems in various colours; the Red Gem is the most valuable and pays 10x the bet for 12 or more, whilst the Blue, Green, Turquoise, and Yellow Gems have lower returns of 8x, 5x, 4x, and 2x respectively.
The wager selection setup of Starlight Christmas uses Pragmatic Play’s standard set of three controls for choosing the bet, coin value, and total bet. These provide a good amount of granularity between the upper and lower limits of €100.00 and €0.20, respectively.
Base Game & Modifiers
The base game of Starlight Christmas uses a six reel, five row reel set, creating a total of 30 unique positions where symbols can land. You’ll need all of them, too, as eight or more matching symbols are required to land yourself a win. Thankfully, this is a scatter-pays machine, meaning that the symbols can appear anywhere – you don’t need to hit them on a payline or payway or even in an adjacent cluster.
After you have been paid for a winning combination, all of the included symbols will disappear, allowing new symbols to fall into view from the top of the screen. There are four multiplier symbols represented by different coloured hearts with wings, and these can appear both at the beginning of a spin or as a result of winning symbols being removed from the playfield.
Each multiplier symbol has a value of between 2x and 500x. If more than one multiplier symbol appears during a single spin, their values will be added together before the total value is applied to your overall win.
Ante Bet
Pragmatic Play often includes the option to place a bonus bet in their games. In Starlight Christmas, the offer is a 25% premium on top of the regular price per spin in return for double the odds of hitting a bonus round. This seems like a fair deal to me, and the paytable confirms that the RTP does not change with the option on or off.
Starlight Christmas Slot Bonus Features
You’ll need to hit four or more scatter symbols anywhere on the reels to trigger the free spins feature. However, I didn’t spot any mention of what happens if the triggering spin has more than four scatters, and I suspect there may be no benefit. That’s a tad disappointing, of course, but not the end of the world!
Free Spins
You receive 15 free spins after activating the free spins feature, and batches of five more spins can be won by hitting three or more scatter symbols whilst the feature is in play.
The main advantage of this mode is that multipliers will accumulate between spins, and with 15 free spins on your starting counter, that’s a lot of time where you can build up a huge multiplier!
For example, if you hit two multipliers on your first spin, which adds up to 7x, any multipliers that land on subsequent spins will be added to that total before being applied to your winnings for that spin. By the time you reach the end of your 15 or more spins, you could have a ludicrously high multiplier in effect; all you need to do then is hit a big win!
During my testing of the game, I had a huge range of different results out of this feature – sometimes it paid next to nothing, whilst on one occasion, I hit well over 1,000x my bet. Clearly, this is a very high volatility bonus round which has bags of big win potential.
Bonus Buy
If you want to skip straight to the most profitable part of the game, Pragmatic Play has included the option to do so at the cost of 100x the normal price per spin. Some jurisdictions, most notably those covered by the UKGC, do not allow this type of feature, which means you’ll have to be forced to trigger yourself a bonus the old-fashioned way!
I also noticed that the bonus buy facility is unavailable when enabling the ante bet. I’m not sure why this is, but you’ll need to switch off the bonus bet before using the bonus buy option.
Pros
- An already awesome slot takes Christmas by storm; what's not to like?
- Another treat for fans of the anime slot niche.
Cons
- Low max win of 5,000x.
Starlight Christmas Slot Review Final Thoughts
I had a blast playing Starlight Princess for the first time a year ago, and I guess this Christmas, I’ll be playing Starlight Christmas instead! I do wish that Pragmatic Play would boost the size of their jackpot prizes a little – 5,000x isn’t bad or anything, but 10,000x would have been a nice present considering this is a Christmas machine. There’s nothing new to see here, but it sure is fun!
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