Jade Legends Slot Review

If you've played Sugar Rush, you know Pragmatic Play has spent the last few years reworking their tumbling multiplier grid in one release after another. With their newest release, Jade Legends, they've taken that familiar formula and mashed it up with the coin-collecting mechanics you usually see in Hacksaw games.

On paper, combining these two features with a 20,000x max win sounds like a slam dunk. But after playing it for a while, I have some mixed feelings. Here's what you need to know before you spin.

Aesthetically, it's exactly what you'd expect from an Asian-themed slot. You've got a 7x7 grid set in a pretty, cherry-blossom-filled garden by a lake. There's a wise-looking guy with a white beard hanging out on the right side of the screen holding a jade dragon, watching symbols like crowns, lanterns, and gems drop. It looks great, but it's nothing we haven't seen a hundred times before.

The RTP sits at a decent 96.50% (though double-check your casino, because they can lower it to 94.5%), and you can bet anywhere from 0.20 to 240 a spin.

Like most grid slots, you need clusters of 5 or more symbols to win. When they hit, they explode, and new symbols tumble down.

Here is where it gets tricky: The base symbol payouts are honestly terrible. On a five-symbol cluster, only the top-tier crowns will even get you your bet back. Instead, the money sits in the multiplier spots and the dragon that cashes them.

Every time a winning symbol explodes, it leaves a golden ring on the grid. If you get another win on that same spot, it gets a multiplier that goes up with every explosion. Sounds great, right? Well, there's a massive catch. In the base game, those multipliers mean nothing unless a Golden Dragon symbol drops at the very end of your spin.

If the Dragon lands, all those ringed spots turn into coins (worth up to 500x) and get multiplied by the number on the spot. If the Dragon doesn't land? All those beautiful multipliers you just built up just vanish. You can have a crazy tumbling spin, light up half the board, and win basically pennies because the collector didn't show up.

If you don't want to wait for five, six or seven bonus symbols, the sharper versions of the bonus come with steep price tags.

If you trigger the free spins normally (or buy them for 100x your bet), your multipliers stay on the board between spins. But you really want the Jade Dragon to land, because he collects your coins without resetting your multipliers. The Golden dragon collects your money but wipes your board clean.

If you're a high roller, you can buy higher tiers:

• The 250x Enhanced Bonus: Only Jade Dragons can land, so your multipliers never reset.
• The 750x Super Bonus: Multipliers double instead of just going up by one.
• The Random Gamble (200x): You get a random free spins level, then a wheel to gamble it one level up. Spoiler alert: I bought this, landed the 250x Enhanced round, got greedy and gambled for the 750x Super round at a 33% chance... and lost the whole thing.

Even the crazy expensive bonuses can come up short. I bought the 750x Super round just to test it out. Because it takes 3 or 4 hits on the same spot to really get the doubling multipliers going, I ended up with a bunch of spots stuck at 2x. I walked away with about 50x my bet. Ouch.

Jade Legends is a weird one. By moving all the payout power away from the clusters and giving it to the Dragon collector, the base game can feel incredibly frustrating.

Ironically, the most entertaining part of the game is the 250x "Special Bet" mode. In this mode, the game just pre-rings all 49 spots on the board with random multipliers up to 1024x before a single symbol drops. I bought this, didn't get a single winning cluster, but a Golden Dragon landed anyway and vacuumed up the whole board for a 259x win.

It's kind of hilarious when you think about it: Pragmatic built this intricate, beautiful tumbling multiplier game, and then sold a premium mode that skips the tumbles entirely and just pays the board.