Gem Elevator

Gem Elevator: Slot Overview

Press the button and join us as we head into the Earth's crust, where software provider Pragmatic Play serves as our guide to the subterranean domain. The occasion is Gem Elevator, yes, yes, another mining-style slot to sink your teeth or your pickaxe into. It feels like just the other day we were down here in the bowels of the planet, a lamp illuminating the way in the search for gold, jewels, gems, and what have you. Truth be told, in another week, we'll probably be back down here again. Perhaps a good portion of online slot makers were miners in a previous life and the urge to burrow into the ground lingers on. Whatever, Gem Elevator it is for now, where nudges, multipliers, and cluster wins are the order of business.

If Pragmatic Play's slot Drill That Gold and Relax Gaming's Mega Mine ever shook the sheets, the resulting love child might look something like Gem Elevator, complete with the obligatory bearded miner guy off to one side of the screen. It's the gem symbols that really smacked of Mega Mine, and the way nudging is also involved. The rest is serious, heavy, underground stuff. Fine enough, nothing special.

Gem Elevator's gaming grid dominates the room, consisting of 6 reels and 5 rows of symbols. This is a cluster pays slot, where winning combinations require at least 5 of the same symbol to be connected horizontally and/or vertically, going on to trigger tumbles. Buried deep in the mine, under a rock maybe, is Gem Elevator's highly volatile math model, kicking into gear when players stake 20 c to $/€240 per spin. If the highest possible RTP is your preference, that would be the 96.53% variant. Lower returns are possible.

After winning symbols have paid, they are taken off the grid by the tumble mechanic. The remaining symbols drop to the bottom, and new symbols tumble in from above, proceeding another chance to win. Tumbles continue until no new win is created. Gems are the main event on the paytable, the smaller blue, purple, green, and orange ones being the 4 low pays; the larger green, blue, purple, and red ones are the 4 highs. Clusters with 5 matching symbols in them pay out 0.25 to 2.5 times the bet, while 13-30 OAK clusters top you up with 10 to 500 times your bet. Nuggets are wild, appearing on all reels to substitute for all symbols except the scatter.

Gem Elevator: Slot Features

The elevator part of the title becomes more obvious now, linking to an Elevator Nudge feature. This works alongside a tumble feature, free spins, and a bonus buy.

Elevator Nudge Feature

At random, on every spin, after any wins and tumbles, any number of reels may be chosen to nudge up or down up to 5 times. If winning combinations form during nudges, wins are awarded, and the nudging continues. Nudges may bring wilds onto the screen. These wilds can carry random multipliers of x1 to x10. If wilds nudge without connecting with a win, for every nudge, the multiplier they carry doubles.

Free Spins

Hitting 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols triggers the bonus game winning 10, 15, or 20 free spins, respectively. On each free spin, at least one reel is randomly chosen to nudge up or down at least one position. Players win a further +5, +8, or +10 free spins when hitting 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols, respectively.

Feature Buy

Paying 100 times the bet buys entry to the free spins bonus. When bought, 4, 5, or 6 scatter symbols land on the triggering spin.

Gem Elevator: Slot Verdict

All aboard the elevator? Maybe not all, but there are bound to be some gamblers walking about the planet's surface, aching for some below-ground cluster pays slot action. In which case, Gem Elevator might be of interest. It was pretty okay to review; not outstanding, and certainly not the next breakthrough in online gem excavation, but good for a look. The nudging mechanic is the main headliner, and it is able to throw out the odd entertaining sequence of events. If you like the idea of second, third, or even more chances, then the way the Elevator Nudge feature can transform a nothing spin into a winner could be a match.

You kind of need all the help you can get, too, because Gem Elevator wasn't shy about dropping dead spins. Good, then, that help comes in two forms - the nudging reels themselves, lining up clusters, plus the way wilds can increase their multiplier when they happen to shift along with a nudging reel. Smatterings of this appear in the base game, like little flakes of gold dust, but real paydirt was only really possible in free spins, where cluster wins, nudges, and multis were a lot more common.

Gem Elevator sparkled much more brightly in its bonus round to the point where the base game became little more than a nuisance. With a free spins frequency of 1 in 320.58, that could be an issue. Max win is less of an issue, though, sitting at 10,000x the bet, though the odds of hitting it are quite demoralising for a Pragmatic Play slot at 1 in 217,391,304. When considering all the factors, Gem Elevator has its ups and downs (bad pun intended), but it's questionable how much, or even if, the ups outweigh the downs.