LIONLINE

About the Company

Lionline Entertainment GmbH & Co. KG is a subsidiary of Loewen Play of Germany. The slot provider's games can be found in at least half a dozen online casinos.

The firm has offices is in Bingen and Strasbourg and a design studio in Dresden.

As is usually the case with German corporations it isn't easy to connect all of the dots as the various arms of a company can be involved in anything from wind power to slots parlors to game development.

We do find the same managing director at Lionline who has been with Löwen Play for over a dozen years, as well as developers with previous or shared roles and we find Spanish as well as German contributors.

Lionline is also associated with KGR-Entertainment GmbH (Kaya Gaming Remote) and we see a transition of some elements occurring in 2014 with a merger, acquisition, or another event.

Löwen Play is a large public company also headquartered in Bingen, Germany founded in 1949. The firm operates over 400 gaming arcade locations in Germany and Holland, mostly west of Berlin, and employs over 2,800 people.

Online gambling laws in Germany are quite complicated with each state (lander) having its own gambling act. To make a long story short, the only place we're aware of for Germans to play these German-made games online legally is on a social casino Lowen Play Fun.

Others can find the games at any gaming site listed below or visit Elcarado after reading a review of the Malta-licensed site.

Software and Games

The company's portfolio is small and many, if not all of the games, come from the Kaya Gaming catalog. That company's website is no longer operational so we might assume the assets have been transferred.

This would assumedly include the platform and white-label solutions that allow operators to create their own branded online casinos. That system would include game provenance and payment solutions as well as a support infrastructure if not the staff to fill it.

The software is developed "in-house" making it flexible for operators who want to make changes. They also speak of game design, however, it's not clear if they do bespoke creations or only if the "...design department works on this daily."

We were pleasantly surprised to see the games load in HTML5 without the need to authorize a Flash plugin when using a desktop browser and when accessing on a mobile phone.

Lionline has its own platform they have dubbed CAGE. As that all runs in the background there's not much we can say about it other than it delivered the games directly in a browser on multiple devices.

The games

The company's website currently contains 12 titles - 11 slots and one blackjack game.

Most of the slots are five-reel games with three visible/active reel positions each (5x3) with various line counts from five to eleven.

The Last Samurai slot is one that may have been created since the advent of Lionline. This was our favorite title, perhaps because of the novelty.

The game has 10 pay lines and some lovely artwork. The number of staked lines is variable at the pleasure of the player and we appreciate maths models that allow that. Special symbols include wilds, scatters, and mystery symbols.

The wild symbols become sticky during bonus spins so they remain in place on the reels until the completion of free games.

Scatters only appear on reels 1, 3, and 5 and are not found on the reels during the 10 free spins so the feature does not repeat.

Mystery symbols simply award prizes whenever 3, 4, or 5 of them appear anywhere on the reels like scatters.

A gambling game is available at the end of any winning event. Wins can be doubled or quadrupled up to 5 times.

Rise of Napolean comes from the Kaya catalog. It has decent artwork and five pay lines over the 5x3 reel set. There is a wild symbol with no special powers except as a substitute in the base game. During the feature, the icon will fill the entire reel with wild powers. Scatters of three or more will trigger up to 50 free spins and it only takes two or more to win at least to win more free spins during the feature.

The blackjack game and several slots were unavailable in test mode on the site, and we got server errors after registering at the free play site.

We were able to open one of the 3x3 slots with 5 fixed pay lines, Triple X. This game was actually our second favorite of the titles we tested. The colors and symbols are well done and add to the excitement.

During the base game, you can try the 50/50 gamble feature after any win.

The best part of the game though occurs when you get three X symbols anywhere on the reels to trigger the bonus round. The scatters do not have to land on a pay line.

During the ten free games, pay lines are removed essentially creating 27 ways to win. The RTP is 95.15%, not super high, but the volatility makes up for it. You almost know in your gut that triggering free spins is going to pay more than 10x your bet on a lucky feature because the ways to win are increased more than five-fold.

The Final Analysis

We don't find many game developers in Germany. We know Germans take pride in things made at home so we would hope that some of these games are available at the Loewen Play amusement arcades.

Online gambling in the country is not easy to do but many people do access offshore casinos - we're just not sure if any German-facing offshore operations carry the games.

The company's random number generator (RNG) along with at least half a dozen games, has been tested and approved by Gaming Laboratories International, LLC (GLI), so we know the games are fair. As for the entertainment value, that is down to each player to determine. 

We prefer cutting-edge innovation in feature mechanics in most games. Still, we do find satisfaction in playing any fair game, especially the titles we can manipulate the volatility of by changing the number of lines staked.

It will be interesting to see if these games find a wider distribution than they already have and whether new titles will be created or if more Kaya games will find their way into the portfolio. Our vote would be for new games, of course. However, there is no sense in letting existing keno, blackjack, or roulette games sit on a shelf, unused.