Christmas Reach Bonus Buy Slot Review

A Christmas hold-and-win where the sticky symbols are cartoon women who tamper with each other's values. The name tells you the rest: this is Christmas Reach with a button bolted on.

Both editions run 5x4 with 20 fixed lines, the same bonus round, the same 30,000x cap and the same 96.11% on normal spins. Buying costs 55x total bet and pulls the return down to 95.49%. That is the entire difference between the two games: 0.62 percentage points, charged for not waiting.

The trade makes more sense once you see how thin the base game is. Five of the top portrait pays 200x. The bonus caps at 30,000x. Everything outside the respin round exists to fund the respin round, so paying to skip it is less of a sin here than in a game with a base worth playing.

The reels sit on a theatre stage. Red velvet hangs behind them, a heavy wooden arch frames them from above, and that arch is loaded with string lights, drifts of snow, candy canes and stacked presents. Three plaques run across the top in blue, red and green - Mini x100, Epic x5000, Xmas x1000 - lit whether or not you will ever reach them. Melted gold candles line the bottom rail and coins spill across the floorboards.

A blonde in a red corset dress and green striped stockings lounges on a purple gift box to the left of the grid; a decorated tree with purple bows and a small wooden Xmas tag stands to the right. Premium symbols are gold-framed portraits of festive anime women against flat green, purple and navy backdrops (and one green-haired man in chains and claw gloves, who appears to have walked in from a different game entirely). Low pays are metal ornament discs stamped with snowflakes, candy canes and fir trees. Wins connect with a gold spark trail that whips across the grid. The art holds up better than most seasonal reskins from 2021, though the pin-up angle is a specific taste and Evoplay makes no attempt to soften it.

Buying reshapes a session more than the maths does. Rather than grinding thin line wins and watching reels 1, 3 and 5, you are placing a series of discrete 55x bets that each resolve in under a minute. Cleaner rhythm. It also strips out the padding that normally hides how lopsided the distribution is.

Most bought rounds die young. Four or five symbols land, nothing with an ability turns up, and the payout comes back well short of the price. What decides a session are the two or three rounds where a Payer or Collector shows early, because from that point every respin is compounding instead of just adding. Everything else is noise around those.

The tree overlay earns its place in the tension. You can see how close the shape is to complete, so a round paying badly on raw values is still worth watching for the 1,000x. Most hold-and-wins give you nothing to follow but a respin counter. Here you will probably catch yourself rooting for two specific empty cells rather than just any symbol at all.

Christmas Reach was always a bonus-first game, and this edition simply stops pretending otherwise. The reels exist to find chests, the chests are where all the money lives, and 55x to walk straight in is defensible for anyone who has already decided they want to play it.

The round itself is good. Four abilities that stack and repeat, a fill goal worth chasing, and enough headroom that a strong one is memorable. What it is not is a new game, and there is no upgraded buy to give a returning player a reason to come back. Evoplay at least priced the shortcut honestly and published the rate it costs, which is more than a fair number of buy editions manage.