Dazzle Me Christmas

Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Overview

If you've been around, you'll know Dazzle Me as one of old-school slot maker NetEnt's earlier releases, which the team followed up with several years later in the form of Dazzle Me Megaways. For the next instalment, Megaways has been dropped and replaced with mistletoe to construct an Xmas edition for the holiday period. The name is Dazzle Me Christmas and includes aspects of previous Dazzle slots, such as Wild Reels, Linked Reels, and free spins, plus a newer multiplier component, all tied up with a bow.

Funny, if you removed the mistletoe and covered the title, it would be hard to deduce Dazzle Me Christmas' theme. It looks a lot like the original did, with that blurry background and gaming grid covered in gems. The Elevate button by the bet area helps divide the two games by giving Dazzle Me Christmas a modern bonus buy element the original lacked, but the two are tough to tell apart just using your eyeballs.

One of the Dazzle range's signature components is a lopsided gaming board. In Dazzle Me Christmas, there are 5 reels utilizing a 3-3-4-4-5 row formation in the base game. In this configuration, 76 ways to win are active, creating winning combinations from the leftmost reel onwards. Though winning potential is not high, the math model's volatility is and is joined by a default RTP of 96.17% (two lower RTP versions are available). The stake range is wide, going from a 20 c per spin up to a possible $/€200 at the most.

Pay symbols in Dazzle Me Christmas aren't numerous and include blue, green, purple, and pink gems as the lower value symbols, plus a bell, and a 7 symbol as the higher pays. Wilds are represented by diamond symbols, which substitute for anything on the reels except scatter symbols.

Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Features

The features available in Dazzle Me Christmas are its Wild Reels, free spins with multiplier, Linked Reels, and 4 Elevate Feature bonus buys.

Wild Reels

Wild Reels may activate at random in the base game. When they activate, wilds land to cover entire reels, and up to 5 reels can become Wild Reels simultaneously.

Free Spins

Players win 8, 12, or 16 free spins when 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols land. Scatters can have multipliers depending on the reel they hit on - x2 on reel 2, x3 on reel 3, x4 on reel 4, and x5 on reel 5. These multipliers are added together if at least 3 scatters appear.

In free spins, the reels expand to 5 rows high, and a multiplier comes into play. This multiplier starts at x1 unless it was boosted by scatter symbols from the base game. The win multiplier increases by +1 for each winning spin. Hitting 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols retriggers the feature, granting an extra 8, 12, or 16 free spins to the total, respectively. Linked Reels are only active in free spins. At the start of each free spin, adjacent reels 1-2 or 3-4 link together, the right reel being a clone of the left reel.

Elevate Feature

The Elevate Feature is where players can buy features. The choices on offer are: Scatter Hunt - increases the chance of triggering free spins for 2x the bet, Wild Reels - each spin is guaranteed to have at least 1 Wild Reel and a random multiplier of x1 to x50, which multiplies the spin win and can be added to the free spins multiplier if free spins trigger. The cost is 10x the bet, Free Spins - 100x the bet to trigger free spins with 3 to 5 scatters, and Enhanced Free Spins - 300x the bet to trigger free spins with 3 to 5 scatters, and at least 1 scatter will have a multiplier of x2 to x5.

Dazzle Me Christmas: Slot Verdict

Review a slot, and the reaction can, broadly speaking, go one of two ways - positive or negative. In the case of Dazzle Me Christmas, let's look at the positives before mireing ourselves in the negatives. First, Dazzle Me Christmas links to a game that is nearly 10 years of age (at the time of review), so certain gamblers who have been around the block once or twice might feel a pang of nostalgia for Dazzle Me Christmas. It possesses pretty much the same look and some of the same features, so, with a dash of imagination, gamblers might be able to pretend they've stepped back to a more youthful time to try their luck. It's also nice to see features from previous Dazzle games come together, such as Linked Reels and Wild Reels, then be boosted by a new multiplier in free spins. Winning potential is bigger than the original release's, too.

However, the potential isn't great, hitting full stride at 2,306x the bet, which is around 3 times more than Dazzle Me but a fraction of Dazzle Me Megaways' figure. Hardcore cynics might even form the impression that even though Dazzle Me Christmas certainly isn't a lazy release, it might seem a little low-oomph for a studio of NetEnt's stature. To sum up, Dazzle Me Christmas isn't exactly the most Christmassy slot ever designed, yet it might be fun as a blast from the past, and while it dazzled a bit, it did feel more like a stocking filling than one of those huge mysterious gifts under the tree that everyone in the house is trying to guess what's inside.