Diamond Vortex Slot – Free Demo

The Core Wild sits in the middle and never moves

Each of the three rings on this hexagonal field carries a Spot, and when a Spot rotates into that ring's Zone the ring is activated. A diamond is a symbol you've probably viewed a thousand times on reels. It usually rests quietly at the top of a paytable, doing very little else. The centre position of this field is permanently Wild and never leaves it. A hexagonal grid of three rings sits around a single Core position at its centre, paying by clusters, and wins require 6 or more adjacently linked symbols. The four low pebble symbols all pay the same, so a cluster of them is worth what it is worth whichever colour builds it. Only the highest win per cluster counts. Winners are cleared so new symbols can drop in. The Zones themselves are static and stay where they are while everything else moves.

But plain cluster wins are comparatively small. My session ran 420 spins at a 3.00 stake, wagering 1,260.00 credits and returning 849.00. That makes this a game that leans heavily on its extras to get anywhere, and when they do kick in, the field changes shape. The balance moved from 25,000.00 to 24,589.00 over that run.

There are wilds helping shape winning combinations. Both kinds substitute for all the regular symbols. The first kind is Sticky Wilds, which retain their position on the field, and the other is the Core Wild, resting in the middle of the whole configuration. In the frames I captured, two Sticky Wilds sat beside the Core Wild at the 3.00 stake. So far so what.

Rotate, Transform, Consume

Diamond Vortex arrives with a bunch of extras to keep the base game moving along. Rotate, Transform and Consume all run during the base game. They culminate in Free Spins. Running around the field are the rings themselves, and after every win the Rotate feature shifts each one a single step, carrying the Spots and the symbols with it, while the Transform feature handles the rest. Rotate only runs after a win, so a spin that pays nothing leaves the Spots where they were. When a Spot slides into a Zone, it triggers that ring and the whole ring becomes one random symbol. Spots travel in the same direction as the rotation. Up to 3 rings can be transformed at once. That is the full-screen case, three rings all showing one symbol at the same time.

Bonus symbols are what unlock the feature. A Bonus symbol entering a Zone is one of the two things a Zone reacts to, the other being a Spot. They are collected through the Zones rather than merely landing on the field, and each Bonus symbol collected grants 5 Free Spins. My session produced two of these rounds across 420 spins, on spin 80 and on spin 196. So the size of a trigger hinges on how many you collect. The first of them, on spin 80, paid 99.00 credits, 33.0x the stake, while the base game on that same spin paid 15.60.

Then there is Consume. Like Rotate, it happens on winning spins. This is where the Core Wild merits its place: Sticky Wilds move inward to the Core Wild, and each one absorbed lifts the Core Wild's multiplier by 1, up to a maximum of x20. In the base-game frames I captured the Core Wild was showing x3 when a ring transformation fired, and the spin closed at 18.00 credits with the balance up from 24,951.70 to 24,969.70.

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Free Spins begin once all that has been settled. Cluster wins, Rotate, Transform and Consume all still apply. They play out in more or less the same fashion as base game spins, the vital difference being that the Core Wild multiplier and the Spot positions carry over between spins rather than resetting. My two rounds came 116 spins apart.

Reading a hexagon instead of a reel set

At first, Diamond Vortex doesn't have quite the same in your face immediacy as a set of reels does. Honey Rush and Reactoonz are Play'n GO's other cluster grids. It takes a while to decipher the hexagon at all. Three rings, each with its own Zone and its own Spot, sit around the Core.

Also, the base game isn't super thrilling a lot of the time, and wins are frequent enough; they just tend to be a tad small. Six linked symbols is the smallest cluster that pays anything at all. Patience is a must. The lowest the balance went was 24,532.00. In my session 90 of 420 spins paid anything, 44 of those paid less than the stake, and the longest dry spell reached 19 spins. That run ended on spin 283. Rotate plus Transform jumble the pace, yet Diamond Vortex is often surprisingly relaxed, as in, there is plenty of the same rotation over and over. The best base-game spin I saw was 69.00 credits on spin 156, 23.0x the stake. Then, in a heartbeat, everything shifts: a Spot glides into a Zone, a ring becomes a single symbol, and the clusters begin falling into each other. Cleared symbols are replaced by new ones dropping in, so one transformed ring can feed a second cluster.

Placing a slot on a hexagon could've been fiddly. In the frames I captured a Transform banner ran across the field as the ring resolved, reading "ring transformation activated".

The Minty Breakdown: Every Sticky Wild the Core absorbs adds 1 to its multiplier, to a maximum of x20, and that multiplier is the only thing on this field that carries from one free spin to the next. My 420 spins closed at 24,589.00 credits from a 25,000.00 start, having peaked at 25,011.40 on the first of the two bonus rounds.

Where the Core Wild multiplier decides it

This carries me to free spins. Things get real there, and the Core Wild multiplier is the key: having a couple of Sticky Wilds consumed is enjoyable enough, yet a Core Wild ascending toward x20 changes what a cluster is worth. The multiplier climbs by 1 per Sticky Wild absorbed, and only on winning spins. This happened in my session for example, on spin 196, when a bonus round paid 129.00 credits against a 3.00 stake — 43.0x. Counting the base game, that spin was worth 129.90, the largest of the session. The base game on that same spin had returned 0.90 credits. The balance went from 24,831.10 to 24,958.00 across it. A neat figure at the stake, yet in Diamond Vortex 43x is a rounding error next to what it is capable of, and the rules put the ceiling at 5,000x the stake. At a 3.00 stake that ceiling is 15,000.00 credits.

Its back to the base game after the uproar of free spins, to wait for the next eruption to happen. The second round landed on spin 196, and the remaining 224 spins produced no third. Across 420 spins the two bonuses that did land paid 228.00 credits between them. The other 621.00 credits came in base-game pieces. That was 27% of everything won in the session. The session's peak balance, 25,011.40, came on the first of them, on spin 80.

Some say a fine slot arranges itself around one idea and refuses to let go, and Diamond Vortex is a game that takes the hexagon, the rotation and the consuming Core. It declines to add anything else on top. Over 420 spins the session returned 67.4% of what went in. The game shows scant regard to the usual reel-set rules. Two bonus rounds in 420 spins is a thin sample, and what a Core Wild at x20 does to a full-screen cluster is what a longer run would have to show.