Lost Temple Slot Review

Worrying about discovering Aztec gold will be the least of your troubles when you start adventuring inside the 3×5 matrix of Lost Temple. This murky underworld of tombs and secret tunnels can lead you to untold treasures worth thousands, or you can end up locked inside an empty cavern with no way out. What leads you to those defining moments is how you choose to play.

Merkur have taken the winning formula of Indiana Jones and Lara Croft and created a slot machine that pays homage to the two, while imparting their own style into the mix. The end result is pleasing if not overwhelming; a compact interface that has some special features, but is all about simple pleasures.

Some have heralded this in as a surprising game from the brand, but so far we’ve seen nothing out of the ordinary other than the design, and even that screams typical Merkur. Will Lost Temple be the bringer of fortune or the bearer of bad news?

Spruced Up

You can immediately tell this is one of the brand’s newer titles from how polished the matrix looks – it’s more HD than a lot of their other real cash slots, such as Magic Mirror or Tiara. Instead of just bandying some symbols together and concocting a passable game, Merkur have created an immersive environment that forms a (loose) story and coherent theme.

When you look at the winlines, you can imagine an explorer dropping into tombs and unearthing various artefacts, like the ones seen upon the paytable. You can even visualise the tomb itself because a depiction of it forms the scatter symbol.

It’s a definite job well done by the brand, but while the design might be exciting, the gameplay is very much the same as usual.

Double Dare

With such an attractive aesthetic to interact with, you’d have thought other elements of the interface would have been improved as well, like the gamble features, but unfortunately they’ve been left alone. Some might see this as a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, but designing double or nothings that are in-keeping with the theme help to encourage prolonged playthroughs. Here you get two features that are so far removed from the theme that they stick out like sore thumbs.

Both have you guessing in order to double your winnings, though the ladder game is more of a risk because you’re not sure what you’re clicking until the button has been pressed – will you land higher or lower. Whereas with the card game, you know that you’ve picked a certain colour, even if it should be the wrong one.

Climbing the Temple Steps

Not everything is about going down into the earth to find treasures, sometimes you have to climb up to make a find, like with the scatter symbol in Lost Temple. A combination of three, four or five will see you activate the free games, as well as win you a cash prize priced between 1 and 5,000 credits (depending on your bet level).

To ensure the fun doesn’t come to an end too soon, you can reactivate the feature inside the level; all you need to do is find several of the explorer and/or temple icons and you’ll get additional rounds. It’s not much, but at this point we’ll take any perks where we can find them.

All Is Not Lost

The Lost Temple has been sold as this new and shiny toy, and from the outside it looks to be just that, but if you actually play the game you’ll come to realise that Merkur haven’t changed their ways. They still deliver highly volatile games with low variance, the fact that this one looks more appealing is beside the point.

Putting those qualms aside for the time being, there’s a decent but short lived adventure waiting to be explored here, be that in demo or play for real mode. You won’t be blown away, but in truth, not every slot has to wow you in order to do its job.