Two familiar features that never touch
Floating Dragon sizes its 5,000x cap to two single values rather than to anything its features assemble. In the Hold & Spin round the cap belongs to the 4,993x diamond. In free spins it belongs to the 500x fish, which is worth exactly 5,000x once the collection multiplier reaches 10x. Every other ladder in the game stops far below those two outliers, and the paytable stops lower still. That is why I hold a game with two well-built features to a competent score rather than a good one.
Neither feature is new. The free spins round runs on the collection template of Big Bass Bonanza: a 5x3 grid, 10 fixed paylines, money values riding on fish and a wild that sweeps them. The respin round is the format Reel Kingdom also uses in Dragon Hot Hold and Spin, where money symbols lock in place and every new one resets the respin counter. Putting both on one reel set is the idea, and the join between them is sealed. The diamond never appears in free spins. The wild never appears outside them and cannot stand in for a coin. Coin values and fish values never meet. Two features share a grid and a theme, neither can lift the other, and each has to be judged on its own ceiling.
Without the diamond, a full Hold & Spin board falls short of the cap
The entry asks for a gold coin in all three positions of the middle reel, and coins land nowhere else, so two coins on that reel are worth nothing. Once the round opens, those three coins stay put, the other reels clear, and every new money symbol resets the counter to 3 respins.
The floor is the round's best idea. Coins are worth 1x to 20x, so the three that open the round total between 3x and 60x, and the guarantee keeps adding three respins until the total clears 20x. Three coins of 7x or more already meet it, and ten of the sixteen coin steps are 7x or higher, so the guarantee exists to repair openings drawn from the bottom six steps. It is a real protection and a modest one: 20x is a single top coin, and 0.4% of the cap.
The ceiling is where the arithmetic turns. Diamond steps run 100x, 200x, 300x, 400x and 4,993x, on reels 1, 2, 4 and 5 only, which is twelve positions. Fill all twelve with 400x diamonds, add three 20x coins on the middle reel, and I make the board 4,860x. That is the largest total the round can reach without the top step, and it is still 140x short of the cap. The round therefore reaches 5,000x through the 4,993x diamond or not at all. Once that diamond is on the board, the opening coins alone leave the round 4x or less from the cap, and any further diamond ends it. The step from 400x to 4,993x is more than twelvefold with nothing in between, so a board that fills up steadily is scaled to a few thousand at the very most, while one symbol is scaled to the cap. Filling the screen is the activity; the ceiling is a draw.
Free spins live on the wild, and the wild's ceiling is one fish
Free spins are where the game does its work, and the wild does nearly all of it. She collects every fish value on screen, the random fish drop fires only while she is on the board, and the retrigger ladder counts nothing but her. On a free spin without a wild, the fish values are replaced uncollected on the next spin, the drop cannot fire, the ladder does not move, and the spin pays only line wins at the same thin paytable values as the base game. The round is as good as its wild count and no better.
What she collects is shaped like the diamond. Seven of the eight fish steps run from 0.2x to 5x, and the eighth is 500x, a hundredfold jump. Across the ladder, a 5x fish is worth 5x before any retrigger, then 10x, 15x and 50x at the 2x, 3x and 10x stages. A 500x fish at the same four stages is worth 500x, 1,000x, 1,500x and 5,000x, and the last of those is the cap exactly. Without the top step, one wild sweeping fourteen 5x fish at 10x collects 700x, so any other route to the cap has to be assembled from many collections. The multiplier repeats the shape a third time: 2x, 3x, then a jump to 10x.
The cumulative wild count is the design choice I credit most. Wilds are tallied across the whole round, every fourth one adds 10 spins and a higher multiplier, and the third retrigger's 10 spins are played at 10x, a stage that takes twelve wilds to unlock. A round that opens slowly still has something to play for at its end. Then the ladder stops. The third retrigger is the last, so a round runs to 40 spins at most from three scatters, 45 from four and 50 from five, and the multiplier stays at 10x however many wilds follow. The only thing left above a strong round is the cap, and a round that meets it ends on the spot with its remaining spins forfeited.
Between features the reels pay for almost nothing
I count six of the ten paying symbols returning the stake or less for three on a line: the five royals at 0.5x and the fish at 1x. Five ships pay 200x on a line, which is 4% of the cap. The theoretical extreme, a screen of fifteen ships paying 200x on every one of the ten lines, comes to 2,000x, and the base game has no wild to help build it. Two ships for 0.5x is the only two-of-a-kind pay on the table, and it returns half the stake.
Every fish carries a hidden money value that nothing cashes outside free spins, and the coin is worth 1x to 20x while paying nothing unless it fills the middle reel. There is no feature purchase, so the only way out of that stretch is three or more dragons or a full middle reel.
A thin game gets thinner at its lowest setting
The default setting is 96.71%, and the game also runs at 95.67% and 94.62%. The top and bottom settings are 2.09 points apart, a house edge of 3.29% against 5.38%, which makes the lowest setting's edge more than 60% larger. With no buy to shorten the wait for either feature and a line game that pays so little between them, nothing in the game offsets that gap. The rules screen shows the setting in use, and I would check it before anything else.
Floating Dragon suits a player who wants a respin round that cannot pay less than 20x and a free spins round where persistence climbs a multiplier ladder, and who accepts that the top of each is one symbol. Anyone looking for a base game worth the stake, or a Hold & Spin round where filling the board is the route to the top, should look elsewhere. The Megaways build moves both features onto a six-reel ways engine, which at least replaces the 10-line base game this version gets so little from.
