Gemix Demo Slot (Play'n Go) Slot Demo & Review

Gemix takes much of its inspiration from Candy Crush and similar mobile games, but Play’N’Go also appears to have been inspired by older online slots such as Bejeweled and Da Vinci’s Diamonds. The result is a game that was very unique for its time and one that I’m almost ashamed to say I got quite into for a time! One more thing I have to get out of the way before moving on… the music in this game is so catchy that I can still hear it in my head hours after I last played the game. Okay, if you’re enjoying the grid slot vibe here on Gemix and want to see what else Play’n GO has to offer in the genre, go and check out the fantastic Reactoonz and the equally brilliant Rise of Olympus.

Wins in Gemix are paid according to how many matching symbols you accumulate in a cluster. Fifteen or more matching symbols are required for a maximum win, and the top symbol is the star. These are exceptionally rare in Gemix, and I’ll bet there aren’t too many people who have ever managed to see fifteen on a screen simultaneously, never mind in a cluster! However, the modifiers can do a lot to rebalance these odds. Fifteen Stars pay 1,000x your stake, whilst the next symbol down, the Red Heart, pays 500x. The Purple Crescent Moon comes next, at 200x your stake for 15 in a cluster, then the Orange Flower-shaped symbol at 100x. Things dive off a cliff quickly after this, but don’t worry – plenty of potential exists here.

The demo slot of the Gemix slot game has the minimum bet set at €0.50 per spin for some reason. I immediately knew from memory that real money play could be performed at €0.10 per spin, and I double-checked this while writing this review. The upper limit of €100.00 per spin is correct, however. This is a huge spread, and I would not recommend betting at the upper end of this range on any game. If you are going to do it, though, a lower variance game such as this represents your only hope of not going bankrupt really fast!

Like many grid slots, the action in Gemix occurs on a 7×7 grid. This gives 49 spaces for gems to fall, with winning combinations removed from the grid immediately and replaced by new gems dropping in from the top. This allows you to win several times from a single spin, but more importantly, in this game, it also charges the meter shown on the left-hand side of the screen. After you hit wins that include 20 or more gems in a single spin, a “crystal charge” will be triggered, activating one of the modifiers described below. Hit wins that include 40 or more gems in a single spin to activate a “supercharge”, which will multiply all of the wins from that spin so far by 3x.

Nova Blast Feature

The Nova Blast modifier feels like the least exciting of the four base features. A random symbol will explode, taking out a patch of 14 surrounding symbols at the same time. The Nova Blast can also transform adjacent symbols to aid in your next cascading reels win. A lot of Nova Blasts can end with nothing much happening, but when it happens to work in your favour, it can also sometimes present an ultra-quick shortcut to a 15-symbol win.

Crystal Warp Feature

If the Nova Blast feels like the least exciting of the four base features, then the Crystal Warp is undoubtedly the most confusing of the bunch. A single gem is picked, and all other matching gems will be warped to other locations. Think of this as a simple shuffling of the deck – the symbols do not warp automatically into beneficial positions as you may or expect, and in my experience, this feature can sometimes be as good as useless.

Light Beam Feature

Now, this is more like it! Undoubtedly the best of the four base modifiers, the light beam feature chooses a random symbol and fires out a beam in all four directions, transforming all symbols it hits into the same one where the beam began. If this should happen to be a star, congratulations – you have 14 matching symbols already. Of course, the light beam will most often choose a low-paying symbol because not only does it guarantee a 14-symbol win, but the chances of a 15-symbol win are very high. Cross your fingers for this one every time!

Chain Lightning Feature

The chain lightning modifier can sometimes be almost as good as the light beam, but as it connects two corners of the grid and diagonal adjacents do not pay, it will sometimes produce a pattern of repetitive near-misses, which will leave you feeling extremely frustrated. Also, which direction the chain lightning will run in is seemingly random, but you can generally bet that the lowest value corner symbol will be chosen as the starting point. I’ve had some amazing hits from the feature, but It can also be a total bust as well.

There isn’t a traditional bonus round or free spins feature in Gemix, but there are several things that deserve listing in this part of the review. Let’s take a look:

Super Charge Feature

I mentioned this earlier, but the supercharge activates after 40 symbols have been included in winning combinations and applies a 3x multiplier to your existing win. You’d expect it to happen a little more often than it does – 40 symbols may not sound like many for a game that pays for cascading cluster wins, yet it’s quite hard to do.

Wild Bonus Feature

There is a diagram shown in the bottom right of the screen, which shows the layout of the current “world”. You need to hit winning combinations on all of these squares before you move on to the next world, and the longer this takes you to do, the bigger the world bonus becomes. It isn’t clear how much of the RTP is tied up in this, but the world number can often grow to around 50-100x your stake, tempting players to keep playing until they reach the end of the current world.

World Wilds Feature

These unique modifiers appear as you progress from world to world in Gemix. Sometimes, these wilds will only appear on non-winning spins; on others, they will spread from one edge of the screen to the other, and on still more screens, you might have sticky wilds instead. There’s no way to know for sure how many of these there are without playing right through the game – you have to presume there is an end or a point where it loops eventually – but I don’t think I ever reached it!