Thunderkick Casinos

By headcount, Thunderkick is one of the smallest companies in this software section — and one whose games still sit in the lobbies of some of the industry's best-regarded operators. That combination is the story of the studio's recent commercial growth: since 2012 it has made slots, only slots, and made them to a standard that operators many times its size keep paying for. The list above shows the UK-facing casinos we cover that stock Thunderkick slots; the rest of the page covers the games, the payout numbers and the company itself.

One point before the detail, because it underwrites everything else here. Thunderkick holds the supplier certifications required to distribute its games legally — the UK Gambling Commission and the Malta Gaming Authority are the most prestigious names on that list — and those approvals follow regulatory checks on the integrity and compliance of the games themselves. Whatever else you weigh up about a Thunderkick casino, the software has already passed that examination.

Thunderkick slots: a small catalogue with a recognisable face

The portfolio is nowhere near endless, and that reads as deliberate: quality has been preferred to quantity. A few spins on any of the better-known machines make the standard plain — the artwork, the sound, the layout of the controls and the structure of the gameplay give up nothing to the output of far larger competitors.

What most visibly sets the studio apart is art direction. A Thunderkick game rarely looks like anyone else's, and the clearest example is Esqueleto Explosivo, the 2015 release that remains its signature: a hand-drawn mariachi band of grinning skulls whose winning symbols burst apart and let new ones drop into place. Full Moon Romance, a later favourite of ours, gets a fuller mention in the payout section below. Across the catalogue there's also a house discipline in how the interface uses its space — controls stay tidy and intuitive, and the games leave sound volume and graphic resolution to the player's discretion.

No tables in the catalogue, and none announced

Thunderkick develops no card games, no table games and no live dealer product. Ranked by breadth of offer it belongs with the smaller suppliers — a judgement about the size of the range, since on quality the argument cuts the other way — so there is no Thunderkick roulette, poker, blackjack or baccarat. A pity in some respects: a wider range would have put the studio squarely alongside its renowned competition. We have found nothing pointing to a broader catalogue; the company's marketing department presumably knows its own plans, but table games do not appear to be among the announced ones.

In practice this costs a player very little, because the casinos in the list above are multi-provider sites. Their card and table sections come from established publishers — Playtech, NetEnt, Random Logic and Novomatic among them — whose table games are certified and tested monthly by external agencies able to prove the integrity of their RNG systems.

Payout rates on Thunderkick slots

Return to player — RTP — comes up whenever enthusiasts compare slots, so here is the honest version of what it tells you. It is a percentage giving an approximate but fairly accurate idea of a game's chances of paying back, and it is never a fixed figure: the number moves with the unit of time over which the game is examined. That is why it cannot carry a decision on its own. Treat it as one indicator of value, to be weighed alongside the qualitative things that actually make a game worth your time.

On those terms Thunderkick performs well. Payout rates across the catalogue sit between 94 and 98%, and the average for most machines is 96.1% — the figure carried by Full Moon Romance, one of the studio's better-known titles.

Thunderkick casinos on mobile

A studio that makes one product can afford to finish it properly, and the mobile versions show where the finishing effort went. Thunderkick adapted its flagship titles to small screens early, for both iOS and Android, and having tested our own favourites we can report that the move from a desktop monitor to a seven-inch screen loses nothing. The controls survive intact — buttons and accessories sit in convenient, space-saving pop-up windows — and the games stay as intuitive on a phone as anywhere, which is precisely what the better mobile casino sites demand of their suppliers.

The company behind the games

The Thunderkick brand was founded in 2012 in Stockholm, Sweden, and the company is still headquartered there. Its certification list has lengthened over the years — the UKGC and MGA approvals are the headline entries — and each addition has widened the circle of operators willing to stock the games, with the studio's annual turnover growing alongside. In any ranking of international providers it now sits in excellent company, a short distance behind giants such as NetEnt and Playtech. The Thunderkick casinos that result are not numerous, but they are prestigious ones, which is what supplier certification of this standard tends to produce.

Nor should the partnership count mislead you about reach: internationally, Thunderkick slots are distributed across a large number of well-regarded platforms and multiple gambling markets. That is a wide footprint for a studio this small.

Thunderkick: Company information

• Company: Thunderkick
• Registered office: Stockholm, Sweden
• Founded: 2012
• Employees: around 80
• Certifications: UK Gambling Commission and Malta Gaming Authority, among others
• Catalogue: slots only — best known for Esqueleto Explosivo and Full Moon Romance

Final opinion on Thunderkick

We expect this brand's presence in our market to keep growing: the average standard of its slots will not stay unnoticed by the people who assemble casino lobbies, and the roster of Thunderkick casinos should lengthen over the coming years. The verdict on the games repeats what the rest of this page has said — desktop or mobile, the graphics, sound, payout rates and usability run at the level of the very famous competition. Should the studio ever add roulette, baccarat, blackjack or poker, we'll cover them here; until then, the slots are reason enough for the page to exist.

18+. A well-drawn slot loses money exactly as fast as an ugly one, so treat the art as the entertainment you're paying for and put a number on that entertainment before you deposit. If the number stops holding, GamCare and BeGambleAware are free and confidential, and registering with GamStop blocks every gambling site licensed in Great Britain.