Crown Jewels Slot Machine
Cascading reels are now such a standard feature on slots that you can find them on titles from just about every software house. This system ‘explodes’ wins, leaving gaps for other symbols to fall into. This creates new wins and new explosions – if you are lucky you’ll experience a cascade of several wins within the same spin. Gem themes are ideal for this system. This taps into the genre of mobile gems games played by millions of people around the world. What Barcrest Gaming Company has done with Crown Jewels is to combine gems with cascades on a real money slot. The result is a very professional and playable game, which gives you the potential for wins of up to 10x on any one spin.
One thing you’ll notice right away is that the gems really sparkle. There is some hard work gone into the production of these and the small animations of flashes of light add to the effect. I’m not 100% convinced by the edges of the gems; then again, I’m no expert on the gems genre! There is only one symbol which is not a coloured gem on this slot. This is the ‘Crown Jewels’ logo, which is also the wild symbol in this game. Audio is very much mixed. There is a computer type noise when the reels spin, followed by funky musical interlude when you hit a win. The explosions have a ‘pop’ and when each set of cascades has finished; you’ll get a cashier’s type ‘ping!’ sound too.
Other than the cascading wins, there are no break-out bonus features for this game. This is a shame, as some other rivals already have wild symbols with different behaviour among their gems.
Setup and Play for Crown Jewels
There are 10 win lines on this slot, which uses the standard 5 reel / 3 row setup. Unusually, you can see the bottoms of the symbols on the next row up too. This gives you a hint of your winning possibilities when the cascades start to come in. You cannot change the win-lines, though you can choose your stake from just 1c through to $40, giving a spin range of 10c through to a huge $400. This type of game is ideal for auto-play, which lets you spin up to 25 times without needing to click each time.
When looking at the pay table, you need to keep in mind that each time there is a cascade, the multiplier for these win amounts goes up. This means that the number of coins listed can be anything from 2x up to 10x, with the number going up by 1 for each cascade which includes a win.
The best paying symbol is the logo; this pays out 500 coins for 5 on a line, and would be a huge 5000 coins if you were lucky enough to hit on a 10x cascade. Even 4 logos has a big prize, this is worth 150 coins times your current multiplier. Remember that the logo also substitutes for the other symbols. This means you’ll often get wins across multiple lines when you have 2 or more of these on the reels. Unfortunately, they do explode as part of the cascade system.
Next in the pay-outs is the diamond, which is worth 250 coins x your multiplier for 5 and 100 coins for 4. The green and red gems come next at 100x with the yellow, orange and purple at 80x for 5 and the blue last at just 50x. As long as the sequence of cascades keeps on going, the smallest wins with the blue gems are well worth having in any sequence.
If you are lucky enough to have 10 winning cascades in a row and land a 10x win, that will be the final one for that particular spin. The cascade stops after 10, and goes back to a standard spin instead. Hopefully by that time you have accumulated a lot of wins.
Crown Jewels Slot – Conclusion
There is no doubt that this game was produced by one of the big professional software houses. The graphics, game-play and attention to the small details show that a lot of care has gone into it. I would rate this one as solid, though on the simple side. Other gems games are already well ahead, adding in extra features, themes and even progressive elements. This game is a solid base, though if Barcrest want to really complete in the ‘gems’ space, they will need to step up their game soon.
