Northern Lights Gaming Slots

If you’ve ever wondered how many slots some developers can release, it’s not always a big number. For Northern Lights Gaming, it is around 37 games in eight years. That's not a typo, and it's not a studio that fell behind. It's a purposeful pace from a team that seems to believe putting out three or four genuinely good games a year beats flooding the market with forgettable ones.

Northern Lights has never tried to be Pragmatic Play. What they've built instead is a small catalog that seems to get picked up by players who've already burned through whatever the bigger studios pushed out last quarter and begin looking for something that actually has moving parts inside it again.

The founding team came through Scientific Games, Williams, Barcrest, and Jadestone before landing in Stockholm and Manchester in 2017. That background shows in the way the maths come together. These aren't games are dressed up to look complicated but running simple math inside. The bonus/feature systems have actual depth, and the volatility listed in the spec sheet is usually a volatility you actually feel.

They originally launched through Yggdrasil's Masters Program, which was Yggdrasil's way of incubating smaller studios with innovative ideas and the tools to make the games come to life. Northern Lights was the first studio announced on it. By late 2020 they moved to Microgaming's Quickfire with Golden Stallion Ultraways, and when Microgaming sold the whole distribution business and most of its other assets to Games Global in 2022, Northern Lights came along in the deal. Games Global now holds the IP rights in perpetuity and handles all distribution, but the studio gets to keep making games its own way.

It just doesn't own what it makes once it's made. That's the arrangement. Seems to work.

Because Games Global only operates in properly regulated markets, you won't run into these titles at offshore-licensed sites in most jurisdictions. If a casino carries them, it's certainly licensed somewhere real.

What These Games Are Like

The portfolio feels like and tracks to medium-high to high volatility. Sessions can swing hard. You'll sometimes spin through a long stretch with nothing much fun happening before the mechanics kick in. That’s the way they’re built.

The studio’s games do better with the visuals than many studios of its size. Themes like bison on the plains or gold rush mining get a fresh enough treatment that they don't feel like reskins of something you've already played. The animation and sound designs are executed purposefully rather than just “good enough”.

Northern Lights hasn’t built any network progressive jackpots. If you're after Mega Moolah, you're in the wrong catalog. What's here usually tops out at 10,000x to 12,500x, which is real money on a decent stake, but it's fixed-win territory based on bet size. RTPs on most of the games sit just above 96%, but some markets get lower rates.

The studio also has a habit of revisiting its own earlier work. Rocky's Gold came out on Yggdrasil and came back as Rocky's Gold Ultraways under Games Global with a reel system that can run 60 million ways to win. The Unusual Suspects series is now three games deep, with the latest adding a full Link&Win layer on top of the original frame mechanic.

Using the Slots Table on This Page

The sortable table covers every Northern Lights game we've reviewed. Sort by Latest or Oldest release date to trace how the studio evolved from its Yggdrasil releases through the Games Global era, which is a real change in mechanical ambition across roughly 2020 onward. Highest RTP and Lowest RTP filter by what returns the most or least over time, but those numbers reflect default settings, and your casino may run different rates depending on the market. Most Voted and Most Played show which games have gotten traction with the LCB community. Rating is the overall reader score.

The Games

Unusual Suspects Ultra Link&Win is the newest entry in the series and one of the most mechanically ambitious things the studio has put out so far.

The game starts out on a 5x3 grid. During the bonus, the reels expand to 5x7, and that changes how wins land and how deep a good run can go. It’s only medium volatility, softer in the risk vs rewards department than most of their titles. You'll hit more often than in most of the catalog, but individual hits won't be as dramatic. Sticky symbols hold, multipliers stack onto held positions, fixed jackpots sit in the mix, and the ceiling is 12,500x, making it one of the highest in the Northern Lights catalog. If you want a lot happening mechanically without needing to ride out long dry stretches to get there, start here.

Rocky's Gold Ultraways is a second look at the studio's very first game, rebuilt for a reel system that can hit 60 million ways to win when everything splits. That’s not a typo, either.

The original Rocky's Gold had math that ran so wide they had to cap casinos’ max exposure at £250,000 per spin. That's the baseline for this game’s math. The Ultraways version is more contained but still plays with real volatility. Three scatters trigger the Rock Picker, where you choose rocks that reveal free spin counts and multipliers up to 5x. During those spins, Dynamite Wilds show up more often and can land as single, double, or quad wilds. The feature can retrigger. Stakes go from 10p to £30, the top payout is 11,500x, and there's a bonus buy at 55x stake for non-UK players.

Sessions can go sideways fast. When the wilds stack in a retrigger, you'll understand why the studio thought this world was worth coming back to.

If you want to try some of the games for free in demo mode, our reviews of Guardians of the Pyramids, Electric Wilds, and Aurora include play-for-free versions, as do most of the reviews you can reach from this page.

Bison Boom Link&Win runs two systems at the same time, which not many studios manage in a way that actually works.

The Wild Boom feature unexpectedly drops wilds onto the reels during the base game when dynamite tokens collect. Also, three scatters on reels 1, 3, and 5 kick off the Link&Win hold-and-spin round, where cash symbols and modifiers reset the spin count back to three each time one lands. Then there's the UPSIZER tool, which lets you pay extra before a spin to add specific modifiers or unlock all available options. Most studios don't give you a dial you can turn up mid-session like that. 96.15% RTP, 5 reels, 20 paylines, bets from 0.01 to 20.00, max win 11,000x.

Wanted: Unusual Suspects is the predecessor to the Ultra version, and it still holds up on its own.

Sticky Frames hold positions where coins land and build multipliers when more coins hit the same spot. The Sheriff Bonus fills all frames at once for a single large collection. Free spins start with a Perk Pick round where you choose features before the spins begin, then the sheriff moves along a trail capturing outlaws for multipliers and extra spins. Exploding Wilds, five fixed jackpots, and a gamble option round out the experience.

It's a lot of systems running together. When they all line up, the payouts are more than decent. When they don't, you feel it. 5 reels, 20 lines, 96.05% RTP, bets from 0.01 to 20.00, and a 10,000x ceiling.

Storm to Riches is quite a bit different from how Northern Lights usually builds a game, and it creates real tension you feel in your gut - it can also tend to make you cut the upholstery where you sit.

Viking ship Wilds land only on reel 5, then walk left one reel per spin until they fall off the grid. Coin symbols with cash values and jackpots from Mini (20x) through Grand (5,000x) only pay when at least one wild is in view. You're watching the wild walk, counting coins on the reels, calculating what collects if it passes through. When a walking wild reaches the leftmost reel and disappears, the Ride the Storm feature can sometimes send it back to reel 5 to start the whole journey again. The Kraken Reels feature can also expand the grid by up to two extra rows in the base game, and by up to five in the bonus round, where it stays expanded for the rest of the feature.

Medium volatility on paper, but the wild dependency makes it feel tighter than that in dry stretches. Anticipation and oft-felt satisfaction make it feel like it swings harder than the math says it should when everything lines up. The RTP ranges lower than the studio's other titles in some markets. Check before you play, but the medium volatility should keep you going to one extreme or the other before the RTP actually starts to affect any given session.

Divine Diamonds is another animal altogether compared to those we have looked at so far. It’s an older title, but a good one.

Divine Diamonds is low volatility. The 96.24% RTP might be the highest in the catalog. Bets range from £0.20 to £120, with a max win of 2,500x. The retro fruit theme is done well. The base game Respin Feature randomly locks certain reels while the rest spin again, or it respins everything. Free spins come from three scatters on reels 2, 3, and 4 with a bonus wheel that locks in both the spin count and a multiplier that holds for the whole feature.

The widest top-end betting range in the full Northern Lights portfolio makes this useful for higher-stakes players who want the better RTP without the swings. The low volatility and decent RTP mean even low-rollers can come close to feeling the returns on this one, given enough spins. If you've been grinding through the high-variance catalog and need something that won't eat your session in one dry stretch, this is probably the one you are looking for.

100 Fortunes is a tough one to pigeonhole.

Forty paylines in the base game, 35 more once the bonus activates for 75 total, and an additional 25 after further features get unlocked. The Yo-Yo Spin mechanic is what makes it interesting; it can trigger randomly at the end of any spin and hit the middle reels with one of three effects: symbol swaps, cascading reels with a guaranteed win built in, or a path into free spins. The main bonus free spins can kick in expanded reels, extra wilds, and multipliers.

Imagine the thinking and planning that goes into a game like this. They’ve built a lot of paths to the same outcome rather than one route you're waiting on to open up. Some players might find that exhausting, but others find it exactly what they want because something is always close to happening. Look for 5 reels, a 40 paylines base, 96.20% RTP, and bets from $0.10 to $500.

This one is worth playing in free play first. Most of them are, but this one especially.