Emperor's Diamonds Free Play in Demo Mode by Genesis Gaming

Emperor’s Diamonds review

Theme and Storyline

Emperor’s Diamonds crosses two classic slot themes.

The first is the classic red-and-gold Chinese theme. As you would expect, this theme has a vague orientalist feel. The reels have symbols that are coins with square holes in the middle and red envelopes.

The second theme is the jewel theme. Simple crystals to play symbols in a gambling game makes a kind of natural sense. The combination appears in the design of those symbols, where the jewels are carved into animals from the Chinese zodiac. There are sapphire fish, ruby dragons, and emerald elephants.

The theme is a neat way of recombining familiar things to make something fresh and original.

Graphics, Sounds and Animations

Emperor’s Diamond has a pleasant visual style. The symbols have a 3D feel to them, but work nicely on the grid of the reels. They are all easily identifiable and attractively drawn. The various jewel-like animals are pretty to look at and all have clear silhouettes.

The animations are not especially imaginative. But, again, they are done with obvious professionalism.

The soundtrack is a well chosen loop of music that fits the theme and doesn’t tire by repetition. Sound effects aren’t flashy, but they also fit in nicely with the atmosphere of the slot.

The whole thing is a testament to how effective it can be to just get the fundamentals right, even if you don’t do anything too fancy with them.

Gameplay

Emperor’s Diamonds base game is a five reel slot. It sports three rows per reel, and 30 non-adjustable win lines.

The Bonus elements (details below) are made up of Free Spins and a Jackpot. The free spins use a different set of reels.

There is no gamble feature.

Wilds, Bonuses and Free Spins

The Wild symbol substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter and Bonus symbols.

The Scatter pays for three or more symbols anywhere on the reels. This also triggers eight free spins for the player.

Six or more Bonus symbols anywhere on the reels will trigger the Diamond Bonus. The reels change so that the only symbols on the reels are Bonus symbols and blanks. The player then gets three respins.

The Bonus symbols stay in place while the reels are respun. Respins reset to three whenever new Bonus symbol appears in the corner of the grid. When all four corners are filled, reels expand to a new setting. This goes through grids 6x3 and 6x4 up to the final size of 8x4. During the Diamond Bonus feature, all Bonus symbols have a randomised value of between 1 and 50 times the player’s bet per spin. These values are raised to the range of 3 and 250 in the final 8x4 grid. There are also symbols with the names of each of the four Jackpots.

At the end of the respins, the player is awarded the total on all the Bonus symbols they accrued.

Bet Sizes, RTP and Variance

The return to player of this game is 96.03%, almost exactly on our yardstick for average of roughly 96%.

The range of bets on the site we tested ran from a minimum bet per spin of $/£/€0.5 up to a maximum of $/£/€45.00 per spin.

The volatility of this game is medium-high, which makes it a moderate match for our preferred slot machine strategies, but not a strong one. Our slot strategies target the highest possible volatility.

Conclusion

Emperor's Diamonds doesn’t offer a lot that is new.

The style is good enough to pass muster, but the gameplay is a bit basic, the RTP is just average, and the volatility is at the low end of acceptable for our strategies. In other words, the slot is decidedly average.

This may explain the slot's very low popularity.