Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase

Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase: Slot Overview

For Boomerang's second instalment of the Lightning Chase range, the studio has moved away from the swords and sorcery of Lady Merlin to a steaming, rather dangerous jungle. Like the first release, Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase has flipped traditional roles where we come across two furry explorers searching for priceless treasures to display in a British museum. Along the way, players make use of a Lightning Chase Hold and Respin feature plus free spins with added wilds.

On a side note, the actual British Museum has courted controversy before over several items in its collection. This includes treasures some people say should be returned to the country they were 'liberated' from. No doubt any museum accepting artefacts from the two heroes of this tale, Tyrus Tiggs and Jack Macaque, might well be asking for trouble as well. The jungle that hosts the action has a slight cretaceous look about it, full of vines, creeper encrusted trees, active volcanoes, and plenty of mist. You half expect a dinosaur to pop its head around the 5-reel, 4-row game grid to see what's up.

There's a lot more life in Temple Frenzy than Lady Merlin, and even better, Boomerang dropped the Boom+ feature the previous one had. If you didn't catch it, players had to pay extra to access features like free spins. Now, players pick from one range of bets, 25 p/c - $/€14, and benefit from all of the features. This also means one fixed RTP value of 95.91%, while volatility has been rated as medium.

Scoring a win occurs when matching symbols land adjacently, left to right, touching horizontally or diagonally. This system is named Connecta Ways and provides 178 ways to win. Artefacts make up the lower end of the paytable, these being chalices, cups, daggers, and bracelets worth up to 2x the bet for five of a kind. Premiums include life forms such as mosquitos, meat-eating plants, a purple frog, a yellow frog, and Jack Macaque worth 4 to 8 times the stake for five of a kind. Tyrus Tiggs is wild, landing on the middle three reels to replace any pay symbol. A couple more special symbols remain, covered next.

Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase: Slot Features

Temple Frenzy provides two ways of potentially winning big - The Lightning Chase Hold & Respin feature, plus a round of free spins with added wilds.

The Tiki mask looking symbols are keys to the hold & respin bonus round. When 6 or more land at once, 3 respins are awarded. The triggering masks are held in position while all other positions are spun. When new mask symbols hit, the respins counter is reset back to 3. As to rewards, prize values on the mask symbols are worth between 1 and 888 times the total bet. If a golden collect symbol appears during the feature, all mask values in view are immediately awarded, and masks are cleared from the grid. The counter also resets in this situation, giving players extra chances to accrue extra mask symbols.

Next, the free spins feature is triggered when 3 or more scatter symbols land on the middle reels, awarding 12 free spins - which can be retriggered without limit. An additional wild symbol is added to reels 2, 3, or 4 on each free spin during this bound round, increasing the chance of landing them stacked. Players can end up with an extra 36 wilds spinning on the reels in this manner. Players can still trigger The Lightning Chase Hold & Respin feature from free spins.

As well as triggering free spins with scatter symbols, there is a chance they are awarded at random following any paid spin.

Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase: Slot Verdict

In several ways, Temple Frenzy Lightning Chase is a step up from Lady Merlin, and strangely, it's not because of what Boomerang has added but what they've taken away. The arguably unfair Boom+ option from the first one has gratefully been removed to give any player who takes Temple Frenzy on a chance to hit its max win. What's left is a colourful jungle romp, which could appeal to players into the hold & respin phenomenon that shows absolutely no signs of subsiding.

If anything, there was a major glut of this sort of feature at the time of review, and naturally, some developers do it better than others. At one end of the spectrum, you've got the likes of Nolimit City and Relax Gaming rocking the slots world, while waves of hold & win bandwagoners make up the numbers at the bottom. No need to point any fingers. Temple Frenzy sits in the middle of the scale, not really offering anything particularly novel to the genre. Where Temple Frenzy scores quite well in this regard is its money symbols may possess much larger than normal values of up to 888x each. Prizes this high aren't something you should expect to see often, yet the possibility is there to be surprised.

As mentioned, the axing of the Boom+ feature is no great loss. It's great to have betting options but withholding free spins and max potential unless you pay extra feels a tad disingenuous. Well, there's none of that in Temple Frenzy, where all players are spinning for a max win valued at 17,760 times their stake. What's not so raging is the removal of the wild multiplier, though it feels worth it in exchange for a level playing field for all players, not just ballers prepared to ante up.

The potential might not be as astonishing as Lady Merlin, yet Temple Frenzy is a better game in just about every other respect. It's probably loud and colourful enough to entertain casual players into hold & wins, though those who prefer extra kick might not find it quite frenzied enough.