Arctic Enchantress

Microgaming partner, Neon Valley Studios, may not have all that many releases under their belt yet, but they’ve seen decent success with most of them so far. Arctic Enchantress takes you into a fairytale world of ice and snow, with the Enchantress herself as the stacked wild that may or may not nudge fully in place during base game play. It always does in the bonus round though, but the main attraction is the Link&Win feature.

With a castle made of ice in the background, you’ll collect Ice Orbs in a meter above the reels to trigger the Link&Win feature. The meter resets per spin however, but the Win Booster ante bet option fills one of the 6 spots at all times. The innovative Column Boost™ feature can enhance your regular Link&Win payouts, but what you really want is the 5,000x Mega Jackpot that drops if you fill the whole grid with sticky prize orbs.

Arctic Enchantress Slot Features

The premium symbols pay between 4 and 20 x your stake for 5 of a kind wins, and the top payer is the polar bear. The stacked Enchantress Wild can land partially or fully in view, and the symbol will sometimes nudge fully in place to cover the whole reel when it lands in the base game. The Wild can land on all 5 reels, and it steps in for all regular pay symbols to help complete winning combinations.

You trigger the Bonus Round with 10, 15 or 20 free spins when you land 3, 4 or 5 scatters anywhere in view, respectively, and you also get an up-front scatter payout of 2, 5 or 10 x your stake. You can retrigger the bonus round to win extra spins in the same way, and stacked Enchantress Wilds always nudge fully in place when they appear during the feature.

The Link&Win feature can be triggered in all stages of the game, and you need at least 6 Link&Win Ice Orb symbols in view to trigger this hold-and-win style bonus game. You can pay 50 % extra per spin to increase your Link&Win chances, and you need only 5 orbs in view if this Win Booster ante bet feature is switched on.

You start with 3 respins, and all triggering cash orbs are sticky on a new and otherwise cleared grid. The respins tally resets for each new orb symbol you land, and these also become sticky. The cash symbols are worth between 1 and 50 x your stake, and filling a column activates the trademarked Column Boost feature. This increases the cash prizes for the relevant column (or columns) per spin that follows.

In addition to regular cash orbs, you can also land 3 different jackpot orbs. These award the Mini, Minor and Major jackpots, and they pay 15, 75 and 250 x your stake, respectively. Fill all 15 positions with orbs, and you win the Mega Jackpot worth 5,000x your stake. The feature ends when you fill the screen or run out of respins, and your total payout is then summed up.

The 200 Spins Arctic Enchantress Slot Experience

You get a taste of the base game at first, before we trigger the Bonus Round at 1:10 into the 3:36-minute highlights video. We skip to the Link&Win feature right after the bonus round has played out, and you can see for yourself how we fared by hitting the play button below.

Review Summary

The visual style looks dated at first glance, but it comes with some decent animations and an atmospheric soundtrack that makes you feel like you’ve walked into a closet and ended up in Narnia. It works quite well for the fantasy theme in other words, and Arctic Enchantress is a decent installment in the Link&Win saga. Nudging stacked wilds makes for an okay bonus round experience, but it’s not really the main attraction.

There’s a reason the subtitle is Link&Win, and this trademarked feature comes with a brand new and equally trademarked Column Boost feature. This ups the ante compared to many similar releases, and the 5,000x Mega Jackpot takes you close to the 5,416.50x win cap. It will perhaps not turn the world of online slots on its head, but Arctic Enchantress takes you into an enchanted world with okay features and an overall solid math model.