Penguin Royale

Penguin Royale: Slot Overview

South African studio and Hacksaw partner NowNow Gaming has been consistently building up its portfolio of casino games since its 2024 founding, and the selection has just grown one larger with the release of a snowy, mountainous, South Pole-style slot. The name is Penguin Royale, and it plonks a regally beaked protagonist in an icy landscape, mixing the birds in tuxedos charm of penguins with a set of connected features, some of which are quite literally encased in ice. If the premise hasn't got you shivering in your boots pining for somewhere warmer, it's time to brave the piercing polar winds of Penguin Royale.

Penguins are known for living in chilly environments, where they sometimes huddle together in big groups to share body heat to protect themselves from the cold and wind. One of these chilly environments has been designed for Penguin Royale, where snowflakes patter down on rocks, trees, and mountains. We don't get a group of penguins in this game, though players are graced by the presence of a king penguin. He shuffles back and forth next to the gaming grid, holding a massive hook and accompanied by the occasional bit of commentary. As a result, Penguin Royale does look cold, but quite inviting all the same.

Penguin Royale is a ways-to-win game, and there are 1,024 ways across the 5x4 gaming matrix. Players stepping onto the snow-blown tundra can stake $/€0.10 to $/€100 per spin, with three feature buys available, too. Regular betting produces a maximum RTP of 96.31% from the highly volatile math model.

Icy casino chips are the low pay symbols. There are five types of them, awarding 0.5x to 1x the stake when landing 5 OAK. After them are grapes, limes, oranges, watermelons, and sevens, paying 1.2x to 5x the bet for a 5-of-a-kind winning combination. Pay symbols vanish from the screen, and new as well as remaining symbols cascade down to fill the reels. This cycles until no more wins are possible. Wilds are on hand to substitute for all paying symbols. They appear on all reels, and a 5 wild symbol win pays 10x the bet.

Penguin Royale: Slot Features

The features in Penguin Royale are a cascade-linked Break the Ice effect, a Multiplier Meter, a free spins round, and feature buys.

Break the Ice

Each symbol comes in two types, standard and Frozen. When standard symbols are part of a winning combination, they explode and disappear, leaving an empty position for cascades. Frozen symbols shatter when part of a win, but don't disappear. Instead, they transform into wilds for the next cascade. Pay symbols (not wilds or scatters) can appear as Frozen symbols on reels 2, 3, and 4.

Multiplier Meter

A Multiplier Meter sits on top of the reels, boosting wins. The Awarding Multiplier starts each spin on x1, while three upcoming multipliers sit next to it on the right. On each cascade, the leftmost multiplier is added to the Awarding Multiplier before being removed, and a new multiplier enters from the right. This repeats on each subsequent cascade, and multipliers take a random value of x1 to x100. The multiplier resets on each spin.

The Blizzard Bonus

Hitting 3, 4, or 5 scatters in the base game awards 10, 12, or 14 free spins, respectively. The base game mechanics apply with some changes. At the start of each free spin, one of the three middle reels is randomly selected. All symbols on the chosen reel will be Frozen symbols on the initial spin and each subsequent cascade. Frozen symbols may or may not appear on the other two reels. The Multiplier Meter functions as it does in the base game. Landing 3 scatters awards an extra +10 free spins, plus 2 free spins for each additional scatter.

Feature Buys

Three buy options are found here. They are BonusHunt FeatureSpins (3x) making each spin 3 times more likely to trigger a bonus game, Break the Ice FeatureSpins (50x) where each spin starts with a random multiplier of x1 or higher, and one of the three middle reels has Frozen symbols, or The Blizzard Bonus for 100x the stake.

Penguin Royale: Slot Verdict

Whilst penguins and polar bears don't mix, on account of the birds not being found in the North Pole, they don't only live in the South Pole either. In fact, banded penguins can be found on NowNow Gaming's home turf of South Africa, and are also known as jackass penguins due to the loud noise they make, which sounds similar to a donkey's bray. Fortunately for players, even if Penguin Royale isn't the final world in ice-themed gambling, it's no jackass either. It faces stiff competition from ELK Studios' Tropicool range, which offers a more expansive suite of features and provides a lot of opportunities to smash ice cubes to bits. They're also arguably quirkier, if that's a factor for you, populating Antarctica (and beyond) with a toucan and a flamingo, rather than the more logical fauna.

But, the king in Penguin Royale isn't without his charm, and neither is the gameplay, which revolves around getting wilds on the grid and growing the Multiplier Meter along the way. Both of these things are linked to cascading wins. The system is less complex than Tropicool's, which might be a pro or a con depending on preference, but getting on a consecutive winning roll here might be quite exciting. Potentially quite lucrative too, as the max win clocks in at 10,000x the stake, and may be achieved in the base game and bonus round. Get lucky by whacking an x100 value on the Awarding Multiplier, and good things might happen. Sub x10 values were more common, but they can add up.

All in all, Penguin Royale doesn't seem destined to disrupt the icy landscape like others have done, but there's enough going on here to produce an entertaining session. It might not be a sub-zero epic, but with punchy multipliers and solid potential, it's a frosty number that earns its place in the growing NowNow Gaming catalogue.