They say diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but I can’t say I’ve ever met a girl who would choose a lump of carbon over her favourite human friend. A more accurate statement would probably be that diamonds are an engineer’s best friend, as they have the highest hardness and thermal conductivity of any natural material…which is critical for any slot that uses diamonds as its theme! The latest such game comes courtesy of industry stalwarts Pragmatic Play and is titled Diamond Cascade – a fifty-pay line machine with a 96.06% RTP and a maximum jackpot prize capped at 8,000x the player’s total bet.
If you don’t look at the rules and paytable information too closely, you’ll probably think this is another traditional tumbling reels-type machine. Skip reading any of that stuff entirely before beginning to play, however, and you’ll soon notice that something feels a little weird about how symbols are being removed from the playfield. This is because of an easily missed extra detail that has been added to the game’s symbols – each position has a different background colour, and those colours form clusters separately from the actual symbols, which are used to form winning pay lines. This so-called ‘colour tumble feature’ is also used during the bonus round as a way of increasing your win multiplier, and it’s essentially a rather clever way to add an extra dimension to an otherwise heavily overused feature. As with most Pragmatic Play machines, there’s also an ante bet available and a bonus buy facility, which costs 100x the normal price per spin.
What are your thoughts on diamonds – are they overpriced nonsense, or do their unique properties justify their outrageous price tag? Whichever camp you belong to, I’m sure you’ll enjoy giving our free demo slot of Diamond Cascade a few spins! It’s available to play below.
| Provider | Pragmatic Play |
| Reels | 5 |
| Rows | 5 |
| Paylines | 50 |
| Bonus Rounds | 1 |
| Bet Range | 0.20 - 125 |
| Volatility | High |
| Max Win | 8,000x |
| Bonus Buy | Yes |
| RTP | 96.06% |
| Our Rating | 6.6 |
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Diamond Cascade Demo Slot
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Theme, Stakes, Pays & Symbols
I’ve already talked about a lot of irrelevant stuff in this review, so rather than talking about how glad I am that I don’t have to work in a diamond mine, let’s look at some other slots with a diamond-based theme! Blueprint Gaming seems to love the theme for some reason, with multiple franchises, such as the Diamond Mine series proving hugely popular with players. Pragmatic Play has a bunch of existing diamond-themed games too – Diamonds of Egypt is one of their most recent examples, and Relax has gotten in on the action too, with their Dream Drop Diamonds progressive jackpot machine. In short, if diamonds truly are your best friend, then you’ll be in good company with the slots that are available to play online!
Of course, it doesn’t really matter if your game features diamonds on its reels if they don’t pay anything worthwhile! This is a fifty-line machine, so the payouts will always be a little smaller than those offered by games with fewer paylines. The highest-paying Red Gem only returns 20x the total bet for a full line of five of a kind, whilst the other high-paying gems quickly fall in value with returns of 12.5x, 8x, 6x, 4x, or 3x the total bet for the Cyan, Magenta, Green, Purple, and Yellow stones respectively. Pragmatic Play has come up with a rather unique and clever way of representing the low-paying symbols as well – instead of using boring old royals, the developer has used lumps of unrefined ore! There are four colours available here – the Pink and Green varieties are worth 1x the current stake for all five symbols, whilst the Purple and Yellow rocks will only get you 0.6x your bet back for a five-of-a-kind combination.
Pragmatic Play slots always offer a good range of bets, and I’m pleased to report that this game is no exception. With the ante bet disabled, the minimum/maximum permitted wagers are €0.20 and €100.00, respectively, whilst enabling the bonus bet adds 25% to these figures resulting in new limits of €0.25 and €125.00.
Base Game & Modifiers
Pragmatic Play has given this machine a five out of five ranking on their variance scale, indicating that this is one of their most volatile games. High volatility slots produce larger wins but much less frequently than low volatility slots, where you win little but often.
The choice to include fifty paylines was probably a good one considering that Diamond Cascade utilises a 5×5 reel set. There are 3,125 possible routes from left to right on a grid of this size, so even 50 paylines don’t cover even a fraction of the possibilities. I did notice that the game seemed to deliver quite a lot of dead spins, which is probably a direct consequence of this imbalance.
Colour Tumble
I mentioned the colour tumble feature in the opening paragraphs, but it’s a key part of how this machine works, so it deserves a little more explanation here. The feature only activates on winning spins, but providing that there is at least one winning payline on the playfield, every position will be evaluated as part of the colour tumble feature.
Here’s how it works – every symbol has a background colour as well as the main glyph. If five or more symbols in adjacent positions share the same background colour, they will explode and disappear as symbols normally do in a regular tumbling symbols game. Additionally, every 20 symbols removed from the grid via this feature will boost your winnings with an additional multiplier.
Ante Bet
Turning on the ante bet option on the left of the reels will increase the cost of each spin by 25%, but in return, you’ll be given increased odds of triggering a bonus round. The paytable does not specify precisely how much better those odds are, only that the chance of hitting a free spins round is higher.
Although there is a very small drop in RTP when enabling this feature, it’s not large enough to make any meaningful difference to the amount of playtime you will likely get from a given bankroll. For me, the guarantee that you will get to play more free spin features is easily worth a 0.04% decrease in RTP.
Diamond Cascade Slot Bonus Features
You’ll need to land at least three scatter symbols during a single game round to activate the free spins feature available in Diamond Cascade. I was a little disappointed to discover that there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to hitting four or five scatters rather than the minimum of three – you always get 15 free spins, and there are no cash prizes attached to any of these combinations.
Free Spins
The paytable dubs this a ‘progressive feature’, as all symbols collected during the bonus round via the colour tumble feature are collected throughout your free spin session. Unlike during the base game, multipliers do not reset in between spins in this mode, but you will still need to explode 20 symbols for every 1x increase in the global multiplier.
The free spins feature can be re-triggered by hitting three or more scatters whilst the bonus is in play, and this time around, the number of symbols does make a difference to the number of spins that you will receive – a three-scatter re-trigger will only add five more spins to your remaining total, whilst four or five scatters will bump this up to 10 or 15 spins respectively. The longer you are in the bonus round, the better your chances of reaching a significant multiplier; therefore, a five-scatter re-trigger is much more desirable than a three-scatter one.
Bonus Buy
Bonus buy features are hugely popular with many players, as they allow you to see the best parts of a game immediately and at a known cost – that last fact is very important in my opinion, and makes the fact that some regulators have banned these features somewhat ridiculous – isn’t it better for players to know where they stand? That’s probably a question for another time, but if you want to take advantage of this facility, it’s available at 100x the normal price per spin.
Pros
- The colour tumble feature adds a new dimension to gameplay.
- Jackpot of 8,000x isn’t the best out there, but it’s better than many other Pragmatic Play machines.
- Regular paytable prizes seem fair for a fifty-line slot.
Cons
- You’ll need to explode a lot of symbols to reach a big multiplier, which is close to impossible during the base game.
- Four/five scatter combinations do not award any additional benefit unless as part of a re-trigger.
Diamond Cascade Slot Review Final Thoughts
This game turned out to be much more interesting than I expected – the theme is a little uninspiring, but the colour tumble feature is a unique addition that I expect will prove popular and probably make its way into more Pragmatic Play games in the future. If you enjoy unusual gameplay mechanics, then you’ll certainly get a kick out of Diamond Cascade.
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