Diamond Storm Slot Machine
They say that diamonds are forever, but when it comes to slot machines, they almost always mean the same thing: you’re in store for a big payout. Sure, bars and sevens might be nice, but diamonds are a common addition to show players there’s something that stands out above and beyond the more traditional gaming symbols.
And if a few precious gems are good, then a whole avalanche of them must be even better. That’s the idea behind Diamond Storm, a slot machine released by Aristocrat in 2015. It’s a game that relies on many of the standard tropes of traditional slot machines, while adding enough extra flair to stand out from the pack.
All the Classics in a Modern Package
Diamond Storm is a sharp looking five-reel, 30 payline slot machine. The object of the game is a simple one: you’ll be trying to match identical (or similar) symbols from left to right across the reels, with longer combinations earning you some bigger prizes.
One of the first things you’ll notice is that many of the symbols you’re playing with on this machine are the same ones that have been popularized by slots for more than a century now. There are cherries, bars, sevens, and liberty bells, all of which we’ve seen a million times before. As in many of the old-school three-reel games, you can even mix and match the bars and sevens: each come in multiple versions (exactly which variants appear can vary depending on the exact version of the machine you’re playing), and while you’ll earn more if you make perfect matches, you can mix and match bars or sevens or different types and still bring in some cash.
The biggest potential winner of all, naturally, is the diamond. This is actually a scatter, with larger and larger awards being paid out as you find more and more of them on the reels, regardless of where they appear. Another important icon to look out for is the star. This is a wild that can substitute for any other symbols, helping to complete winning combinations.
The Approaching Storm
The most exciting feature on this machine is the bonus round, which is triggered whenever you hit at least three bonus symbols on the same spin. When this happens, you’ll be awarded with 10 free spins, all of which come with the additional advantage of having extra diamonds added to the reels.
There are two major versions of this machine, each of which makes it easier to hit big combinations or even the large jackpot prizes that can come when you hit a large number of diamonds. First, there’s Flamin’ Hits, in which – as we described above – additional jackpot diamonds are added to the reels during the bonus round. The other option is Liberty Stripes, which offers a special hold and respin feature during this round. This will let you continue to collect jackpot symbols, leading to tense situations where your prizes grow larger and larger as the reels respin.
A Player’s Best Friend
Diamond Storm is reminiscent of many other Aristocrat titles. The company has a knack for taking classical themes and bringing them up to date for the modern market, making them new and exciting for players without straying too far from what they expect. In this case, making the bonus round really feel like an exciting and potentially lucrative game each time you play it is enough to take this machine from forgettable to fun and entertaining.
