Chosen by the Gods Slot Review

Cleopatra's temple, sacred animals, piles of gold coins, and yes, Egypt again. What makes this one worth loading is the bonus round, a hold and win built as a three-storey climb rather than the usual one-and-done respin round.

The reels around it are old-school on purpose. 5x3, 15 fixed lines, left to right, no ways and no tumbles. RTP sits at 96.04%, and the best regular symbol in the game, the Egyptian Queen, pays 70x for five of a kind. That tells you where the money is kept, and it is not in the paytable.

Two features carry everything. Cleo runs the free spins and powers up Wild multipliers while she is at it, and the Bonus coins run a jackpot ladder that tops out at 5,000x if a player can climb all three levels. Bets run from 0.10 to 75.

This is daylight Egypt, not torchlit tomb. The reels sit in a sunlit temple courtyard with pale sandstone columns, broad palm and reed leaves crowding in from both sides, and a shallow red-tiled pool at the base where purple lotus flowers float. Gold coins spill onto the ledges either side of the frame. The reel window is deep maroon inside a gold pharaonic surround capped with a winged cornice, so symbols glow against the dark while the background stays bright and airy.

Cleo is a dark-bobbed woman in a white gown against a turquoise panel, one hand raised mid-gesture, and she is the only human on the reels. Everything else is animal or artefact: a green cobra with a gold collar and a violet eye, a crimson falcon head in a gold crown, a jewelled ankh, a purple and gold Eye of Horus. The Bonus coins are heavy gold discs stamped with their value, and the jackpot ones carry a pharaoh in profile relief with a halo of light behind them. The card royals are where the art budget ran out, colour-coded letters with gold trim and a scarab pendant glued to the Q. The Egyptian dressing is nicely drawn and completely unoriginal, and the game knows it.

The base game is bare. Fifteen lines on a 5x3 grid does not give you many chances to connect anything, wins land on a bit over a fifth of spins, and most are card royals returning a fraction of the stake. Long flat stretches are normal.

Free spins turn up often enough to keep a session breathing, but eight spins is short and the whole round rides on how many Cleos show up early. A dry start and it ends before the Wilds carry any weight at all.

The coin round is where the tension actually lives, and it is cruel in the best way. Three spins, reset on every new coin, and a first level that takes a lot of collecting. Watching the counter crawl toward the target with one spin left is the best thing the game does, and most of the time that is exactly where the run stops. Level 2 shows up far less often than the tidy structure suggests, and you'll probably never see Level 3 without buying in repeatedly. Medium-high is the honest volatility label, though sessions feel spikier than that because so much of the return is parked behind one rare trigger.

Evoplay spent all its ambition in one place and left everything around it plain. The three-level climb is a good idea with some bite to it, and because values double and then triple on the way up, the gap between stopping on Level 1 and finishing Level 3 is enormous rather than incremental. Cleo doing two jobs at once during free spins is a neat piece of design too.

The price is a base game with nothing happening in it and a headline figure that depends almost entirely on a trigger most sessions never see. Medium-high volatility undersells how top-heavy the math is here. Still, the bonus round earns its keep, which is more than most Cleopatra slots manage.