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Lightning Storm Live is a live casino game show released by Evolution in 2024. It’s another in a long line of Evolution-made game shows that emphasize high production value and entertainment while being a unique take on online gambling, with multiple flashy bonus rounds and highly volatile payouts. The game boasts a return-to-player (RTP) rate of up to 97.44%, depending on the bet you’re making, and stake limits between $0.1 and $10,000. It’s available on both desktop and mobile in any casino with Evolution software.
High-concept casino game shows are a staple for Evolution at that point, so we have a lot of earlier releases to compare to Lightning Storm Live. However, the game still feels unique in many ways and relies on ideas we haven’t seen before. Our review dives into everything that makes this game stand out. We’ll also include our own opinions on the game and its performance compared to other titles in the same game show category.
Players from United States accepted!
United States
Rated :
3.6/5
| Game Specifications | |
|---|---|
| Game name | Lightning Storm Live |
| Game provider | Evolution |
| Game type | Game Shows |
| Streaming from | |
| RTP | 97.44% |
| Bet range | €0.10 - €10,000 |
| Max win | 20,000x |
| Side bets | No |
| Supported platforms |
|
| Supported OS |
|
| Languages |
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
+8
All supported languages
|
Evolution’s Lightning Storm Live is likely one of the most highly-anticipated casino games in 2024. After all, Evolution is the driving force behind live casino game shows as a concept, being the company behind hits like Crazy Time and Monopoly Live. Moreover, the whole lightning theme seems to be a reference to the Lightning series of games, which are all incredibly popular in their own right. It seems like an easy slam dunk for Evo, right?
Frankly, our first impression of Lightning Storm is that it feels a bit bloated. As you’ll see in our gameplay guide, almost the entirety of the game time is spent playing through bonus rounds and special features. This quickly makes them feel like less of a “bonus” and more of a way to cut the game’s pace down to a crawl. For reference, only one bet can even be considered a “main bet“. All of the others are attached to bonus rounds and minigames, which feels a tad excessive.
Still, audiences seem to be quite eager for feature-heavy games with high volatility, and Lightning Storm fits the bill perfectly. We’ll reserve our full judgment for the end of this review, but it’s important to understand that this game is all about bonus rounds. Sure, bonuses feel like the centrepiece of almost every game show out there. But in Lightning Storm, they’re not just the main attraction – they’re the whole game.
Unsurprisingly, though, the game’s presentation and graphics are top-notch. Evo can hold a masterclass in making games look good, and this is a perfect example. It’s streamed from a purpose-made studio, with special screens and visuals hand-made for every bonus round. Combine that with Evolution’s proven track record of making big wheels and lightning bolts, and it’s all quite impressive.
That said, most of the game’s features are calculated through RNG instead of a truly live element. In fact, the main game is played using an innovation called the Digiwheel. It’s still a real wheel, but it can change its appearance using video technology. This opens up some interesting options, as you’ll see with the available wager options.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The basic Leaf bet is the only wager in this game that has a fixed payout at 1:1. All other results are bonus rounds, which means their payouts will vary.
Any number bet can qualify you for any bonus round, so they’re technically all equal in that regard. However, each of these bets has a huge range of possible results, which means it’s extremely volatile. One could say that this is the main idea behind the Lightning Storm game, though.
However, bonus rounds have different maximum payouts, and the highest rewards are reserved for the Lightning Storm. Also, the rounds have different maximum payouts:
Besides that, all payouts are hard capped at $500,000, which is the same with all Evolution games
| Bet | Payout | RTP | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lightning Storm Bets | |||
| Leaf | 1:1 | 97.44% | |
| Number | Up to $500,000 | 95.13% | |
| Storm Chaser | Up to $500,000 | 95.12% | |
| X Chaser | Up to $500,000 | 95.13% | |
Lightning Storm game’s RTP (return-to-player) rate is 97.44% if you’re playing the Leaf bet or 95.13% if you’re playing numbers. This sort of RTP is comparable to many other game shows such as Crazy Time, but is honestly not great overall. Especially when you consider the fact that Leaf bets are quite dull and most players are here to enjoy the bonus games.
Remember that LiveCasinos.com isn’t here just for live casino game reviews. We also handle guides and strategies, helping you get the best start possible. You can find some money wheel game strategies here.
Our review of Lightning Storm by Evolution left us with some mixed opinions. While it’s a great example of Evolution’s capacity for innovation, it can feel overly reliant on somewhat disappointing bonus rounds.
To start with the bright side, the game’s main concept works pretty well. The fact that the bonus rounds are randomly assigned to different betting positions in every round is an interesting idea with a lot of promise. It certainly banks on the fact most game show players enjoy a lot of volatility. Additionally, the game looks great and feels engaging to play, which is expected from an Evo game.
On the other hand, the bonus rounds are a bit too much. More than 80% of the betting options are about some sort of bonus round, and you can expect to see a bonus trigger every few rounds. This kind of drains the excitement out of them, though. All of the flashy graphics and excitement from the presenters fall flat when most results are going to be a 5x payout. We’ve noticed that oversaturating game shows with such “bonus” rounds is a bit of a trend lately, and this game is far from the only example. Pragmatic’s Treasure Island comes to mind, and we’ve had similar criticisms of that game.
As such, we have doubts about Lightning Storm’s longevity. It’s a nice spectacle to enjoy for a while, but we doubt we’ll be returning to it too often.
Very Good
Last Update: December 3, 2024
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