Lightning Storm Live: Our Review, How and Where to Play

The basic gameplay of Lightning Storm is intentionally very simple. All you have to do is place bets on one of the six available positions. The dealer will then spin the wheel, and the pointer at its top eventually stops on one of the segments. If the bet you placed corresponds to the winning segment, you win. It’s a classic setup for Money Wheel-based games in the live casino space.

However, things get a bit more interesting when you factor in how some of the bets work.

Firstly, there is only one instant payout bet in this game. It’s represented by the little leaf-like symbol – Evolution’s logo. This is a straightforward coin toss – if you bet on this position and the wheel lands on a Leaf segment, you win even money and the round ends.

All other segments of the wheel are marked by numbers from 1 to 20 instead of a leaf. In every round, the game randomly assigns a bonus bet to each of these 20 segments. This means that the wheel essentially looks different in every round. For instance, number 20 might be a Battery Changer bonus in one round but a Monster Mash bonus in the next one. This makes the game more dynamic in interesting new ways, as no two rounds are the same. Of course, one type of bet still appears on a specific number of segments in every round, so the rounds are statistically identical.

As such, you don’t bet by predicting bonus rounds. Instead, you pick one or more of the 20 numbers on the game board. If the number ends you get to participate in the corresponding bonus round, whatever the bonus may be.

Lightning Round

Lightning Storm borrows the Lightning Round concept from games like Lightning Roulette. Essentially, one or more segments of the wheel can be randomly increased with a multiplier ranging between 2x and 50x. If a segment marked in the Lightning Round wins, any associated payouts are increased by that multiplier.

Special Bets

The game also allows you to place two special kinds of bets, which you can see below the regular betting board. They’re called Storm Chaser and X-Chaser.

• Storm Chaser guarantees a bet on the Lightning Storm bonus round. Basically, placing a bet on this position means you’re making a bet on the wheel segment that is assigned a Lightning Storm bottom round, no matter which number the segment is.
• X-Chaser ensures that you participate in any rounds that have been assigned a Lightning Round multiplier. Any number/segment that is assigned both a bonus round and a random multiplier is automatically covered by this bet.

Bonus Rounds

It’s time to get down into the nitty-gritty: the all-consuming, all-important Lightning Storm bonu rounds. They can get surprisingly complex for a bonus mini-game, so we’ll go through each of them one by one.

Hot Spot

This round features a large wall of multipliers randomly dispersed around a 9×12 wall. The game is called “hot spot” because the biggest multipliers are grouped into one section of the wall. The location of this hotspot is randomized every time the bonus round triggers. The further away you move from the spot, the lower the multipliers tend to be.

Your job is to just pick one of the positions and hope for the best. Despite this round’s unique way of distributing multipliers, it’s still completely based on chance. Hot spots or no, you have no way of knowing which multiplier you’re picking.

Additionally, a 3×3 area of the wall is randomly selected after the players pick their positions. All multipliers in this area are doubled.

The maximum payout in this round is 10,000x the bet.

Monster Mash

Monster Mash is a strange little minigame in which you attempt to make your own Frankenstein’s monster. To do so, you have to combine different body parts using a sort of slot machine.

It boils down to three horizontal reels. Each reel contains body parts with different multipliers. For instance, one part may have 10, while another is showing 20, and so on.

You just spin the reels and hope to hit as big of a combination of multipliers as possible. Pretty straightforward, but there are some interesting interactions included.

Multipliers in this game appear in two forms – additive and multiplicative. As the name implies, additive multipliers simply sum up their value with any other multipliers. For example, if you hit a Head that was assigned 20 and a torso that was assigned 5, you would win a total of 25x your bet.

However, the body parts can also have multiplicative increases. These are presented as golden and with an all-important “x” beside them. They multiply the value of any other prizes you hit during the round. For example, a Head with an additive 20 and a torso with a multiplicative 5x would result in a payout of 100x.

All of this can add up to a maximum of 10,000x once you factor in the possible Lightning Round multipliers.

Battery Charger

This round opens up with a conveyor belt that contains 10 batteries. Each of these batteries is randomly assigned a multiplier, but one of them has a multiplicative Global bonus.

The presenter will then crank a sort of wheel which makes the batteries roll down onto a charger. A small prize wheel will also spin to determine the outcome. If the wheel lands on red, the battery is discarded, making room for the next battery on the belt to fall down onto the charger.

If the mini wheel lands on green, the multiplier on the last battery to win is your payout. However, if the wheel lands on green with a Global multiplier battery, all of the multipliers in the remaining batteries are increased by the Global multiplier. If only one battery remains on the conveyor belt, its multiplier becomes the payout.

Fireball

This round consists of a single ball and a large grid divided into 149 pockets. The ball is initially suspended above the grid. And yes, Fireball is actually live and determined by real balls and pockets, unlike all of the other bonus rounds in this game which are made using RNG and computer graphics.

Each of these pockets contains a certain reward. Regular pockets contain randomly assigned multipliers, and there are also some Double pockets sprinkled in.

The ball is then dropped, and the prize for this bonus round depends on the multiplier it lands on. If it lands on a Double pocket instead, all of the multipliers on the grid are doubled and the ball is dropped again. This can happen multiple times in a row until a total multiplier of 10,000x is reached, which is the round’s maximum payout. In that case, all Double pockets are replaced by regular 10,000x pockets.

Lightning Storm

The game’s namesake and flashiest feature, Lightning Storm is the highest-paying bonus round in the whole game. Rewards can go up to 20,000x, but it’s comparatively harder to trigger.

It takes place on a rooftop that’s about to be struck by lightning. Your job is to pick one of three positions and wait to see what kind of a reward it racks up.

Lightning will then come down and randomly move around the board, collecting multipliers. The final reward is either a sum of several multipliers, depending on the position you picked at the start.

That’s pretty much all there is to it. The Lightning Storm round is quick but exciting.