Ways Of The Qilin (PG Soft) Slot Demo & Review

There are so many online slots that use graphics and imagery based on Far Eastern culture that it seems logical to assume that players must really love this type of game! Not a month goes by when we don’t see at least one or two such releases here at Demoslot. We have reviewed Eastern Emeralds, Dragon Boat 2, and Cai Shen 168 just in the past few weeks, but our library contains more than enough of these games to warrant us creating a whole new category for them; we should probably get around to that soon!

The numbers stated on the paytable here are given in coins, and you need to multiply the values by the number of winning payways to get the return of each combination as a multiple of your stake. I mention this as I was initially unsure if I had made a mistake when writing this part, but I eventually confirmed that these numbers are correct despite seeming very low. Our top paying symbol is the Golden Frog, which has a payout of 4x your bet for each complete payway of six of a kind, followed by the Old-Fashioned Ship with a return of 2.5x. There is a Pot surrounded by gold coins with a payout of 2x for all six symbols, but I couldn’t quite make out what the next symbol is meant to be. It appears to be some kind of Green Vegetable (maybe?) and has a return of 1.5x, whilst the Bag of Gold Coins and the Gold Coin Necklace share a payout of 0.75x for six of a kind. The low-paying royal symbols are divided into the Ace/King, which pays 0.5x, and the Queen/Jack/Ten, which all share an unimpressive return of 0.2x the current stake. Whilst these numbers do feel very low, it’s worth remembering that you can win on tens of thousands of individual payways on each spin.

The wager selection system used in PGSoft’s games appears a little overcomplicated initially, but the various selectors allow excellent granular control over your current bet. The minimum/maximum bets allowed are €0.20 and €20.00, respectively, and you can choose to bet any multiple of €0.20 that falls within that range.

Ways of the Qilin uses a very large playfield with six reels of six rows each. This is a size that we commonly see used by grid slots but much less frequently by standard machines such as this one. Some Megaways games use a similarly sized setup, of course, and I suspect that this is where PG Soft got their inspiration for the jumbo-sized reel set used here.

Wilds On The Way

During any spin, you may see symbols landing surrounded by silver frames. These framed symbols can appear on reels two, three, four, and five and will sometimes appear in stacked configurations of two to four symbols high.

If a framed symbol forms part of a winning combination, then the frame will automatically be upgraded to a golden frame which will remain in place for the following reel cascade. If the new gold framed symbol is involved in a win, it will be transformed into two to four wild symbols depending on the height of the frame.

The larger-than-average reel set used in Ways of the Qilin comes with a small caveat; you now require four scatter symbols to trigger a bonus round instead of the more usual three! If the bonus triggering combination features more than four scatter symbols, then the extra symbols are used to provide a boost to the potential of the feature, as described below.

Free Spins

Before the free spins feature begins, each triggering scatter symbol will transform to reveal a bonus boosting prize. These prizes can include additional free spins and multipliers, which are awarded in addition to the standard five free spins the game provides at the beginning of every bonus round.

Every feature starts with a multiplier increment value of one, but this can be increased by hitting “x1” symbols whilst the feature is in play. Each time a winning combination is scored, your multiplier increment value increases the current multiplier. The bonus round multiplier is not reset between spins, so it is possible to reach some very high multipliers towards the end of the bonus round.