Colt Lightning Firestorm

Colt Lightning Firestorm: Slot Overview

Cast your minds back to February 2023, when Play'n GO released its horsey meets lightning slot Colt Lightning. Don't remember? Maybe the opening sequence, where a horse dashes across the landscape before getting obliterated by a bolt of lightning, might jog your memory. Yes, no? No matter, either way, Play'n GO and its ponies have cantered back for a follow-up going by the name of Colt Lightning Firestorm. The vibe is close, but the game's makers have seen fit to come up with different features while dramatically boosting one of the key numbers.

A dry grassy zone is where we find ourselves for Colt Lightning Firestorm's base game. A desolate Wild West-style twangy guitar chunks up the atmosphere as if a titanic showdown is about to take place. Fortunately for horse lovers, no colts were obliterated at the start of the game, so the lol moment was absent. Otherwise, the look and feel of Colt Lightning Firestorm is about on par with the slot that preceded it.

Colt Lightning Firestorm's gaming panel has a more regular setup than before. This time, hitting spin sets in motion a 5-reel, 4-row game board, which has 1,024 ways to win on it. Before doing so, players are able to pick a stake of 10 c to $/€100. The volatility sits around medium-high, going by the 7 out of 10 ratings, while the default RTP, from the five different return configurations, is 96.2%.

Blocky stone 10-A royals are Colt Lightning Firestorm's low-pay symbols, worth 1.2x to 1.6x when a 5 OAK winning combination lands on the grid. Next are snakes, wolves, cougars, eagles, and Colts, paying 2 to 8 times the bet for a 5-of-a-kind hit. Colts appear only in the base game and are replaced by Fire Colts in the free spins round. A combination of 5 Fire Colts pays 8 times the bet. Wilds are able to help complete winning ways by substituting any regular pay symbol. They are present on the three middle reels.

Colt Lightning Firestorm: Slot Features

On the whole, Colt Lightning Firestorm's gameplay can be said to be fairly divergent from the previous slot, where its features are Lightning Blaze, Firestorm Feature, Firestorm Strike, and Fire Free Spins.

Lightning Blaze

Lightning Blaze is triggered on any spin when a horseshoe symbol lands on the middle reel. During Lightning Blaze, 3 to 20 Fire Frames randomly appear on the reels, transforming symbols into one type of animal symbol.

Firestorm Feature

Landing 4 Firestorm scatters on reels 2, 3, and 4 triggers the Firestorm feature. The Firestorm Feature consists of Fortune Strike and Fire Free Spins, both of which will be triggered during the Firestorm feature. At least, this is how the feature is worded in the game sheet. In the demo, when 3 scatters landed, they triggered just one of the features, not both. The Firestorm Strike offers an instant prize of 5x to 200x the total bet.

Fire Free Spins awards 8 free spins, played on a gaming grid expanded by one extra row, upping the number of ways to win to 3,125. During Fire Free Spins, no Colt symbols appear on the reels, as they are transformed into Fire Colt symbols that pay double. Hitting the Horseshoe symbol triggers the Lightning Blaze feature. During this Lightning Blaze, 1 to 4 Fire Frames appear at random on the reels, and stick for the remainder of the round. At the end of Fire Free Spins, all Fire Frames in view transform into one type of animal symbol. Lastly, each Fire Ball scatter landing during Fire Free Spins awards +1 additional free spin, up to a maximum of 46 free spins.

Colt Lightning Firestorm: Slot Verdict

Colt Lightning Firestorm is one of those slots where colossal winning potential threatens to eclipse the rest of the game's other goodies, or, smudge out the deficits. Have to say, the first downer occurred when 3 scatters landed to trigger the Firestorm feature. The way the feature is explained in the game docs makes it seem as though you're about to be granted both a Firestorm Strike instant prize and Fire Free Spins. But no, only one or the other ever triggered. For the first encounter, only Firestorm Strike was activated, spinning through its reel of prizes before ending up on the awarded cash total, 10x the bet, or something like that for anyone interested. What's funny is the reel teased by half-stopping on 200x, the largest possible prize value, before skipping away to something less thrilling. Tilting stuff in other words.

Those two aspects left a bad taste in the mouth that Colt Lightning Firestorm struggled to prance its way out of at times. For the most part, it didn't really. You can see the possibilities, however, and that 50,000x the bet advertised max win might be like blinkers for any gamblers who are predominantly fixated on big numbers to the exclusion of all else. Yeah, it is a big number and double what the original Colt Lightning slot commanded, though there might be a greater chance of seeing a horse get pulverised by lightning in real life than witnessing either slot hit their full potential (it happens LESS than once in a billion spins, whatever that means - 0.10 in 1 billion?).

Apologies if that sounded overly snarky, as Colt Lightning Firestorm didn't go too badly, all things considered. Free spins could produce a good number of frames, and filling them with the same high-pay symbol at the end of a bonus round could be exciting. Fair dues. However, cover over the massive maximum winning number for a moment, and Colt Lightning Firestorm loses a chunk of its allure.