Juicy Gems Bonus Buy Slot Review

Fruit and gemstones spin inside a flaming arcade cabinet, and everything worth having sits in one hold-and-win round at the end of a long wait. That game already exists, and it was reviewed at Juicy Gems. This edition is the same machine with a purchase button screwed onto the side, so the button is what deserves the scrutiny.

It costs 32x the total bet, which sounds fair and is not. Buying the round returns more than half a point less than spinning for it, and the base game here has already been trimmed to 96.03% from the original's 96.11% purely for carrying the option. Evoplay charges that small toll on most of its buy editions. This one then charges a second, much larger one at the till.

Underneath, nothing has moved. Five reels, three rows, five fixed paylines running left to right with only the highest win per line paid, high volatility, a 14% hit rate, bets from 0.10 to 75. Max win comes in at 5,578x, a hair above the original's 5,555x, and the Grand Jackpot accounts for nearly all of it.

A gold-framed cabinet stands against a wall of purple low-poly crystal, flames licking up behind the top crest, the Juicy Gems logo rendered in molten orange with a small BONUS BUY tag stamped underneath. That tag is the only visual change from the original. Everything else is carried straight over.

The reels sit on deep maroon with thin orange dividers between them, and the symbol set splits cleanly down the middle: a pale lilac cut diamond and a chunky green emerald on the gem side, then plums, lemons, oranges, grapes and a pair of glossy red cherries. The Scatter is a heart cut from red stone with SCATTER stamped across it in gold, which promises considerably more than it delivers. Down the left edge the four jackpot tiers glow in their own colours, red GRAND above blue SUPER above green MAJOR above purple MINOR, quoted as cash totals that scale with the stake, so GRAND reads 50,000 on a 10.00 bet. It is competent fruit-machine art with no ideas of its own, and the flame trim does most of the heavy lifting.

Unbought, this is a slow machine. Five fixed lines on a 5x3 grid means most spins resolve instantly and pay nothing, and a good share of that 14% hit rate is cherries dropping 1x for a pair. Those crumbs keep the balance ticking without ever moving it. The Diamond line is the one thing worth waiting for down here, and waiting is the operative word.

Buy in and the session takes a different shape entirely. Each purchase is a self-contained burst of tension: five symbols land, the counter reads three, and everything hinges on whether a sixth arrives before it empties. When symbols keep sticking the momentum is excellent, values piling up while the counter snaps back and the jackpot column starts to look reachable. When they do not, and that is most of the time, the round is finished in three spins and whatever those five symbols happened to be worth is all there is.

Repeat it a few dozen times and the shape becomes clear. The rounds that fizzle are the norm, the rare one that keeps resetting carries the whole session, and that is a perfectly good design for a hold-and-win. It is less good at a price that has already taken its bite before the reels move.

The Bonus Game is a decent hold-and-win. Symbols stick, the counter resets, the Grand sits there as a distant but legible target, and nobody is being asked for much money to go and look at it. The base game wrapped around it is thin, though, and outside the Diamond line there is little reason to sit through it.

What sinks this edition is the button it is named after. It gives back less than the game it is attached to, it seeds the round at the legal minimum every single time, and a player has no way of learning either fact from anything Evoplay or its listings publish. The original plays identically, costs nothing extra to spin, and returns more. That probably makes this the wrong version to load.