Better turn the brightness setting on your phone down for this one, folks; Little Gem is a startlingly bright slot from Pragmatic Play and associates Reel Kingdom. Apologies if this sounds judgemental, but when a game hits the desk with Reel Kingdom's name on it, a measure of weariness often creeps in. The studio has a track record of producing some pretty out-there games that are as garish to look at as they are odd to play. Visually, Little Gem exceeded all expectations, but gameplay-wise it was the opposite and proved to be a chore to play through.
Have you ever seen a fashion show where models swan onto the runway wearing increasingly outlandish clothes and wondered who on earth would wear this stuff? Little Gem was like that once the ocular assault began. It's a basically arranged 3-reel game covered in precious stones and X's, while a bluey-purple aurora borealis like effect glitters in the background. Strangely, while it might be all gems, stars, and shiny lights, the sound effects are surprisingly low-key, so there's very little in the way of aural entertainment. Players who prefer throbbing music when getting a classic slot machine hit will have to fire up their favourite hard house playlist to make up for Little Gem's silence.
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A short jingle does play when a winning line hits, but that won't be too often as the game has a hit frequency of 1 in 20 spins. Only three of a kind winning lines are possible, and there are 5 fixed paylines to land combinations across. The default RTP is quite high, so there is a level of balance here coming in at 96.7%, though there is a less desirable version of Little Gem with a 95.65% value. Volatility has been classified as medium (4 out of 5), and bet levels are broad, starting at 5 p/c per spin, rising to $/€250 at the most.
Polished stones make up the bulk of the normal pay symbols, with smatterings of random slot icons thrown in for fun. From the lowest value pay symbol to the highest, players get X's, hearts, orange gems, blue gems, stars, pink gems, green gems, BARs, and diamonds. Landing a winning line is worth 4x the bet up to 50x the bet. One more regular symbol, for now, is the wild symbol which substitutes for any pay symbol, and when a wild can help form a win, it expands vertically to cover all positions on its reel. Wild wins are worth the same as diamonds.
As the name states, Little Gem's focal feature is its Hold & Win bonus round. On the middle reel only, gold and silver Money symbols may appear, each one taking a value of 1x to 20x the total bet. When 3 Money symbols are in view, the Hold and Respin bonus round is triggered. When this feature is activated, the three triggering Money symbols remain on the reel, and all other symbols fade away.
A total of 4 respins are awarded, and if new Money symbols land, they lock in position; plus, the spin counter is reset back to four. During respins, Diamond Money symbols may land on reels 1 or 3. These symbols have values of 100x to 500x the total bet. When respins run to zero, all Money symbol values are awarded, and the feature ends.
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Reel Kingdom has a knack for pushing out unusual slots, but they've really outdone themselves this time. It's funny how one of the more flamboyant, look at me, games we've come across in a while has such empty gameplay. The low hit rate can lead to lengthy runs of dead spins, and when coupled with the fact there's no music can be deathly dull to power through. Symbol values aren't too bad, so when a win finally manages to emerge from the morass, it's almost akin to finding an oasis in the desert. The top return value is decent, however, so there is a form of equilibrium going on. Either way, are people going to queue up and play Little Gem to experience a bizarre exercise in balancing the books?
Debatable, and it's probably best not to pick Little Gem if your idea of a good time is sensory overload while a raging hot rod of a game bucks away like a wild bronco. Once our eyes adjusted to Little Gem's garish colour scheme, the game was just straight-up dull. Nothing happened most of the time, the process of waiting for symbols to hit seemed to take ever longer lengths of time, and the desire to stick it out to see the finer moments took progressively more willpower. They say time flies when you're having fun, so if time feels like it's going backwards, what does that imply? In short, if you want an absorbing hold & win game with depth, Little Gem is unlikely to fit the bill, though, to be fair, you don't see this sort of feature on a 3x3 grid often.
On the positive side, several of Little Gem's key stats aren't bad - default RTP is solid, and the max win of 2,460x the bet isn't atrocious, for what it is. Little Gem is a game which takes a lot of player effort to extract any joy out of, it must be said, and why bother when there are better hold 'n wins or classic slots mere clicks away. Still, one cool thing about people is that we have all types of interests and turn-offs. So, there might be players out there who'll be brought to their knees in gratitude by what Pragmatic Play and Reel Kingdom have made, whereas others are likely to flee at first sight.
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