Gold of Sirens Slot Review

Sirens guard a hoard of sunken gold, and there are two separate ways to get at it. The grid underneath is ordinary, 5x3 with 20 fixed lines paying left to right, but Evoplay bolted a free spins round and a hold and win jackpot game onto it, and the two play nothing alike.

The free spins are the reason to load this one. On every spin of the feature, one low-paying symbol type gets picked at random and every copy of it on the grid turns Wild. Not one instance. All of them, and a fresh pick on the next spin.

High volatility, and nothing to buy your way in with. The features arrive when they arrive.

Two cracked stone mermaids stand guard either side of the reels, tails curled around broken Greek columns, while shafts of surface light cut down through the water behind them. Small fish drift across the top of the frame. Red and pink coral crowds the bottom. It is all one deep saturated blue, and the reel tiles sit dark enough that the symbols pop cleanly out of it.

The four sirens are the best art in the game: silver, turquoise, purple and auburn hair, gold collars, shells and starfish worked into the braids. They all have their eyes closed and the same drowsy half-smile though, so in practice you sort them by hair colour and nothing else. The low pays are jellyfish in pink, amber, blue and green, drawn with far more personality than the card royals a sea-themed slot would normally get away with. The Scatter is a gilded picture frame holding a blue-skinned siren coiled around a drowning sailor, a nicer piece of storytelling than the feature it triggers really needs. Wild is a gold trident crown set with blue stones. Jackpot symbols are heavy gold coins stamped with an octopus, their value printed straight across the face.

Above the grid a temple pediment carries the three jackpot bars: MAJOR in blue, EPIC in red, MINOR in green. Poseidon himself gets a full portrait before the first spin, crowned and scowling with a glowing jellyfish balanced on one palm, then never appears on the reels at all.

The base game is thin, and it is meant to be. A three-of-a-kind jellyfish line pays 0.1x to 0.5x the line bet, which on a small stake is money you barely notice arriving. Sirens land often enough to keep the balance drifting sideways. Everything this game has to give sits in the two bonuses, and the flat stretches are the toll for getting there.

Free spins carry the better tension, because the pressure resets on every spin. Eight spins is not many, and each one is its own little draw: watch which jellyfish crowd the board, then wait to see whether the game picks that one. When it does, the grid lights up in a way a normal wild-heavy round never quite manages. When it picks the type that landed once in the corner, a spin is gone. That swing, repeated eight to twelve times running, is the most interesting thing about playing it.

The jackpot game has the opposite problem. It arrives with no warning at all: no collection meter filling, no near-miss on five coins, nothing building. Six coins land or they do not (and yes, everyone has played a hold and win by now, so the round itself holds no surprises). Once it starts, the reset-to-three counter does its job, and a board sitting at eleven coins with one respin left is properly tense. Getting to fifteen is another matter, and you will probably never see it.

Evoplay put a proper idea into the free spins here, and that lifts Gold of Sirens above the studio's long run of good-looking, hollow releases. The 96.18% return helps, sitting well above where their catalogue usually settles. The hold and win next to it is competent and completely familiar, which is fine; it gives the game a second way to pay without pretending to be new.

Where it falls short is ambition at the top end. A 6,119x ceiling from a high-volatility 2021 slot is unremarkable, and the EPIC sitting behind a full 15-coin board makes the biggest number on the meter closer to a lottery ticket than a target. What holds up best is the art. Five years on, the sirens and that sunken temple still look better than plenty of what shipped alongside them.