5 Lions Reborn

Theme & presentation

Another lion, then. Pragmatic Play has been strip-mining this particular jungle since the original 5 Lions, and Reborn (2025) is the umpteenth trip back to the same gilded temple. You know the drill before you spin: red-and-gold lacquer, coin-drop chimes, a stoic big cat staring out from the reels like it’s slightly bored of being here. It looks clean and expensive in the way Pragmatic always manages, and it runs smoothly on mobile. But “polished” isn’t the same as “interesting,” and there’s nothing here that made me sit up. If you’ve seen one Pragmatic Oriental-luck slot, you’ve broadly seen this one’s wardrobe.

How it plays

Standard 5-reel, 3-row grid with 243 ways to win. Symbols land, matching kinds pay left-to-right across adjacent reels, no paylines to squint at. The base game is exactly as eventful as that description sounds, which is to say: not very. It ticks along, dribbles out small ways-wins, and quietly waits for the scatters. The lion is your wild — note it only lands on the three middle reels — and it’s the thing everything hinges on. Betting spread is wide and the whole thing is comfortable to sit with — I just found my attention drifting during the base game, waiting for the feature to actually show up.

The feature

The hook is the Free Spins round, and to Pragmatic’s credit they let you pick your poison. Three scatters trigger it and you choose one of seven options trading spins against a starting wild multiplier: 20 spins at x2, 15 at x3, 13 at x5, 10 at x8, 8 at x10, 6 at x15, or a mystery draw from that pool. The clever bit is the Rising Wild Multiplier — every win involving the lion wild bumps the multiplier up by its starting value, and you can pick up an extra spin or three at random. Land a Super Free Spins trigger and you drop straight in at the top: 20 spins, x15 to start. That escalation is genuinely where the game earns its keep, and it’s the only part I actively looked forward to.

The numbers, straight

• Max win: 5,000x — confirmed across multiple independent reviews and Pragmatic’s own game page. Solid but not headline-grabbing by today’s standards.
• RTP: 95.5% (the build reviewed here). Pragmatic also ships a default 96.5% version and a 94.5% version, so check what your operator actually serves you — it matters.
• Volatility: High. Long dry base game, feast-or-famine feature.
• Reels/ways: 5 reels, 243 ways to win.
• Hit rhythm: Base wins land around 1 in 3.3 spins, but the feature triggers roughly 1 in 107 — so you’ll grind a fair bit between the good stuff.

Verdict

5 Lions Reborn is competent, and competent is the ceiling here. The rising-multiplier free spins round is a legitimately fun engine when it fires, and the pick-your-own-tradeoff choice adds a flicker of agency most Pragmatic slots don’t bother with. But the theme is threadbare familiar, the base game is a waiting room, and a 5,000x cap on a high-vol grinder is fine rather than exciting — especially on the 95.5% build, where you’re giving up a full point of RTP versus the 96.5% version for identical gameplay. Fun in the feature, forgettable everywhere else.

SlotWhizz rating: 3.0/5. A perfectly playable sequel with one good idea, but the maths always favour the operator — this 95.5% build hands the house a 4.5% edge over the long run, and no rising multiplier changes that.

18+. Demo for fun, not profit. Play-money results are for getting a feel, not forecasting a profit — the house edge decides real sessions. Play responsibly.