Astro Legends: Lyra and Erion Slot Review

Astro Legends: Lyra and Erion is a video slot from Foxium, developed for Microgaming and released in November 2018. This unusual slot game comes with a grid of 22 symbols and cluster pays. You can play this slot at online casinos such as LeoVegas, Guts or ComeOn!.

Theme and basic information

How to describe Astro Legends in three words? Funky, retro and sci fi. Actually, this game looks like funky sci fi adventure made in the 80s, though at a much higher quality than it would have been possible to make it back in the 80s.

Lyra, the heroine of the game, wears a pink and purple catsuit, has a massive purple afro and plays the keytar. Also, she’s a shapeshifting wolf.

Her foe, Erion, is a crystal monster apparently hellbent on destroying music and light and all that is good in this universe, i.e. everything that makes life livable.

That’s the gist of it and it sounds like one involved story for a slot game. The scene is set on some alien planet with Lyra and keytar on the left and Erion popping up on the right to wield evil. In between you find a geometric grid of 22 symbols that all pop onto the screen individually instead of spinning on reels. The symbols show various crystals as the high value symbols and the playing card symbols from 10 to A as the low value symbols.

You can play this game from €0.10 to €10, which makes it a game for the budget conscious. Considering that this is a very volatile slot, this is just as well.

The Base Game

In this game, wins are paid out in clusters. You need at least five symbols touching on the sides (not the corners) anywhere on the reels to form a cluster in order to create a win. Wild symbols can substitute for all other symbols. There are no bonus symbols or scatters, so nothing to worry about here. Also, the wilds only appear in selected places and you can’t get more than three at once. To make up for that, wilds can come with multipliers of 2x to 5x on any win.

The main feature in the base game are the Sonic Re-spins. Imagine it as a sort of battle between Lyra and Erion. On any winning spin, Erion might emerge from the depth to freeze the symbols on the reels. The winning combination is held in place and all other symbols are hidden. Lyra plays her keytar to blast a sonic wave and the hidden symbols reveal further matching symbols attached to the cluster. At least, that’s the hope. The feature ends when no more matching symbols are attached to the cluster or all symbols are already matching. The win is paid out and Erion disappears once more.

Also, pay attention to little stars inside bubbles that are attached to some symbols here and there. Lyra collects them, and they contain random numbers that are added to a meter above Lyra’s head.

The Bonus Game

The meter above Lyra’s head is counts the points those little stars contain. You need to collect at least 100 to activate the bonus game. This might take you a hundred spins or so, but not much more than that because the stars usually come with 4 to 10 points. So, as opposed to other games where a meter has to be filled to activate a bonus, this one isn’t difficult to achieve.

Once you’ve collected 100 points or more, the Stardust Lyra Spirit Bonus is activated. It’s a mini game that is sort of a click me game. But only sort of. Lyra turns into a wolf and you have to choose one among three paths she could run along on. Erion looms in the background. Once you’ve picked a path, Erion will create obstacles on one or two of the paths and if you’re unlucky, one such obstacle will be on the path you picked. That will cause Lyra to run into the obstacle and lose a life. She only has three of those and once all three are used up, the feature ends.

Whether there is an obstruction on your path or not, however, Lyra will run along and gather some coins on the way. At the end of each section, you have to choose again which path she should take and Erion will add his obstacles again.

This continues until all of Lyra’s lives have been used. The longer you manage to pick a path that won’t be obstructed, the more coins Lyra can collect and the higher the coin prizes will become.

Conclusion: A unique but volatile slot

The theoretical RTP (Return to Player) of Astro Legends is 96.63%, which is good value. Truth be told, our first thought after we’ve played this game for a while and especially after our first go at the bonus game was: this is a very bizarre game. That impression has not changed. You will either love it or hate it. Astro Legends is not just unique but also quite unusual. Whether that is good or bad is up to you to decide.

In terms of graphics, soundtrack and originality, the slot deserves top marks, because it’s been incredibly well done, and you won’t find anything like it anywhere. But the gameplay is somewhat slow because it takes a while for all those individual symbols to pop onto the screen and reveal their contents. There’s not turbo or quick spin option. And the auto-play is reset every time you activated the re-spins, which can happen every 10 or 20 spins, though sometimes it may take 50 spins.

Let’s just say, Astro Legends is an experience and you should try it at least once. Whether you come back for more is entirely up to you afterwards.