Of all the Earth's various minerals, few are more sought after than diamonds. Not only are diamonds famous for their sparkly beauty, but they're also the hardest mineral which naturally occurs, scoring a 10 on the Mohs Scale of Hardness. Not sure exactly how the scale assesses hardness but a ten sounds pretty impressive. Wonder what humans are? Before tunnelling down that rabbit hole, let's bring the focus back to the slot at hand, Diamond Cascade from the extraordinarily fecund studio Pragmatic Play. Diamond Cascade might not look very special in a static screenshot, yet it has a unique line win cluster removal combination that's worth investigating; feel free to check it out with us if you're intrigued by a new mechanic.
A few years ago, scientists talked about finding a super-Earth planet made of diamonds. Named 55 Cancri, someone even calculated its worth at $29.6 nonillion - a nonillion being the number 1 followed by 30 zeros in the US, or 54 zeroes in the British system. Which value would you pick? Either would make you richer than Croesus, as they say, or richer than Elon in modern-day terms. A planet made of diamond is one way of describing Diamond Cascades' background imagery, which looks a little bit like the place the SG-1 team visited in the episode Cold Lazarus. Shards of the stuff poke out of the ground all about the place, just waiting to be extracted on a whim. Is winning big from Diamond Cascade as easy? Probably not, but dreams are free.
Diamond Cascade is played on a 5x5 reel set with 50 paylines. Regular wins pay left to right, starting from the left-hand side of the grid. It's a highly volatile game with a maximum RTP of 96.06% when playing the normal game, 96.02% when using the Ante Bet, or 96.14% when buying free spins. While base bets range from 20 p/c to $/€240, activating the Ante Bet increases the stake by 25%, giving players a greater chance of triggering the feature.
With a name like Diamond Cascades is no shock to see gems dominate the paytable. There are 11 pay symbols of various cut, size, and colour paying out 0.6 to 20 times the bet when a line of 5 matching pay symbols land on the reels. Helping players in this task is Diamond Cascade's wild symbol, which appears on all reels, substituting for all regular pay symbols.
Here's where things start to deviate from the script, and it begins with the Color Tumble feature. When winning lines land, all clusters of at least 5 symbols with backgrounds of the same colour, adjacent anywhere vertically or horizontally, explode from the reels. The remaining symbols fall towards the bottom of the reels, and gaps are filled by symbols dropping in from up top. Color Tumbling only occurs if there is at least 1 background cluster present after any symbol win, and continues tumbling until no more background clusters are in view.
All symbols exploded by the Color Tumble feature are collected by a meter. For every 20 collected symbols, the win multiplier increases by +1. The win multiplier applies to all wins on the spin after Color Tumbles have ended. In the base game, the multiplier resets between spins.
Hitting or collecting 3 or more free spins scatters in the base game triggers 15 free spins. What changes in free spins is that the win multiplier does not reset until the bonus round comes to an end. Should 3, 4, or 5 scatters hit during the round, players win an additional 5, 10, or 15 free spins, respectively.
When buying free spins for the cost of 100 times the bet, 3, 4, or 5 scatter symbols will randomly land.
We mentioned Diamond Cascade not looking particularly special in the intro, and one wonders if the studio held back on the optics due to the experimental nature of the game's features. You just don't see this specific mix of line wins and cluster clearance happening much, if anywhere. Pragmatic Play has a tendency to dump a shed load of games on the market to see which ones rise to the top, gain popularity or just plain old stick. Perhaps if any of these scenarios play out for Diamond Cascade, the studio might revisit the Color Tumble mechanic and drop it into a more impactful-looking game. Then again, knowing Pragmatic Play's track record, it wouldn't be a shock to see Diamond Cascade be recycled anyway, regardless of how much success it goes on to garner.
Whilst fairly novel, it isn't super apparent that Diamond Cascade's Color Tumble feature will catch on like wildfire. Not meaning to take anything away from how it performs, but it doesn't feel like a major step up from just collecting winning symbols, never mind what colour the backgrounds might be. Maybe the so-so presentation prevented us from seeing the feature really shine, yet once the novelty wore off, it just didn't feel like a giant leap forward. But not all new features have to be a giant leap, of course, and what Diamond Cascade does certainly isn't negative. Feeding symbols into a growing multiplier has its merits in just about any game, which is complemented here by the fact the win multiplier does not reset in free spins. Get the cascades a-flowing, and Diamond Cascade is good for wins of up to 8,000 times the bet.
Diamond Cascade turned out to be a decent game with interesting features despite, at times, feeling a little hastily thrown together. As we've come to expect from Pragmatic Play, the studio does like to reuse what it's already put out, and perhaps a more engagingly presented slot in the future using the Color Tumble feature might throw the mechanic under a more favourable light.
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