Crystal Burst XXL Slot – Free Demo

A gemstone slot built out of fruit

The pressure is on to see how they’ll follow up when a studio has a superb year. Greater fame amounts to greater demands, and it’s not always favourable attention either; the crowd is swift to turn on anyone who reveals even a hint they can no longer manage it. After a brilliant streak, Gamomat has met this predicament head-on. They have launched a challenge of their own titled Crystal Burst XXL, released in March 2020, and the monster has at last been set loose. I played 350 spins of it at 0.40 a spin for this review.

Crystals are a name you’ve probably heard of in slots. Gemstones are one of the most recognisable themes on the reels, packed with symbols you really wouldn’t mind running into on a dark screen, and a vivid theme merits a vivid game. Behind the crystal the symbol set is fruit-machine standard: sevens, bells, watermelons, grapes, oranges, lemons and cherries. Here, Gamomat has produced, and the setting is certainly tidy when Crystal Burst XXL arrives up on screen. A 5-reel, 4-row grid sits before the shine of cut stone, with 10, 20, 30 or 40 paylines to pick from, and wins form on neighbouring matching symbols along the lines you have paid for. Wins on separate lines are added together, and only the highest win on any one line counts.

Picking bets at 0.01 per line, players can attempt a burst on any device. At the 0.40 total bet used here, that is the full 40 lines in play. Cracking this one is a milder job due to its low volatility, rated 2 out of 5. That can be consistent rather than savage, and Crystal Burst XXL arrives with an RTP of 96.16%. Hit frequency was unexpectedly high at 42% in my session. My balance never dropped further than 4,969.84, a little over 30.00 below where it started. But straight line wins are comparatively small, making this a game that leans heavily on its features to get anywhere, and when they do kick in, Crystal Burst XXL can be striking. Five sevens, the highest of the regular symbols, pay 12.5 times the stake.

There is 1 wild assisting form winning combinations: the crystal. It substitutes all symbols and lands on reels 2, 3 and 4 only, and it expands to fill its reel. An expanded wild covers all four rows of that reel, so it joins every payline running through it. So far so what, but strap in, because Crystal Burst’s warp drive begins to fire from here.

The crystal, the respin and the ladder

Crystal Burst XXL comes with a couple of features to keep the base game rolling along, peaking in the Respin Feature; an Expanding Wild lands and sparks a respin. Every Expanding Wild on screen remains sticky for the stretch. A second or third one sticking can leave three whole reels wild while the respins run. The run tops out at a maximum of 3 respins.

The other feature is the gamble, with 2 choices for players to pick from if available. It comes after a win, and it is not offered in autoplay or on high wins. The card gamble, red or black, doubles the win or forfeits it on a straight 50% call. The ladder gamble shifts you one rung up or down, Split grabs a partial collect, and Take Win banks the whole. Dropping off the bottom level of the ladder loses the interim win outright, and the odds of climbing change with the level you are on.

Minty’s Final Note: 513.32 came back on 140.00 staked, and 400.00 of it landed on spin 208; the other 349 spins returned 113.32 against the 139.60 they cost. Sticky wilds hold still in Sticky Diamonds as well, and Royal Seven XXL works the same fruit symbols at much the same RTP, but neither hangs as much on one reel filling up.

Spin 208 paid for the other 349

I have come to expect so much from them. So it’s tough not to slide Gamomat releases under the microscope for closer scrutiny than usual. In a critical mood, let’s get a few gripes out of the way: at first, Crystal Burst XXL doesn’t have quite the same in your face urgency as some Gamomat games do. The two help screens also disagree on direction: the paytable shows wins paying both ways, while the rules screen says leftmost only.

Also, the base game isn’t super thrilling a lot of the time, and wins are frequent enough — 148 of my 350 spins paid something. That leaves 202 spins in the run that returned nothing at all. They just tend to be a tad small, with 91 of those paying less than the stake back. Fifty-seven spins, then, gave back more than they cost. Patience is a necessity. It took 153 spins in testing to win more than 15x the bet, and Expanding Wilds plus respins vary the tempo, yet Crystal Burst is often unexpectedly relaxed. That win was 6.80, and it left the balance at 4,978.24, still short of the 5,000.00 start. The longest I went without a win was 15 spins, finishing on spin 227; as in, there is plenty of spin in spin out monotony, then, in a heartbeat, everything shifts. Fifteen spins at 0.40 is 6.00 of stake for nothing back.

Having said that, Crystal Burst XXL is easy companionship and it swiftly grows on you, partly because of the way Gamomat has handled the theme. Bets are set per line rather than as a total, so the line count and the line bet together decide the stake. Placing a slot among gemstones could’ve been dreary. But the tidy, uncluttered treatment hugely lifts the mood while keeping an edge – especially once you’ve seen what Crystal Burst can do.

This leads me to the respins, where things get real. Only reels 2, 3 and 4 can carry a wild, so three is also the most that can stick at once. Sticky wilds are the key and having one Expanding Wild in play is enjoyable enough, yet a reel or two more on the board blows Crystal Burst up. The session’s high point landed on spin 208, producing a payout of 400.00 from a 0.40 stake, an exceptional figure in any game. Nothing else came close: the next-biggest wins were 17.60 on spin 272, 12.80 on spin 287 and 8.00 on spin 238. It carried my entire session: 140.00 wagered, 513.32 back, a return of 366.7% and a balance that moved from 5,000.00 to 5,373.32. The peak balance of the run was 5,383.24, reached on spin 289.

Its back to the base game after the uproar of a respin run, to wait for the next outburst to happen. Only another Expanding Wild will start one.

Some say gem slots naturally arrange themselves into a pecking order, from the studio giants down to new filler, and Crystal Burst XXL is like a bold new stone coming in and eclipsing the biggest, showiest rock on the shelf. Every bit of the 513.32 I took back came from line wins and the respins behind them. It is a neat little slot offering a lot from very few moving parts, and Gamomat has kicked things off in a quietly astonishing way. When the dust settles, it will be intriguing to see how their competitors react.