Legacy of the Sages Bonus Buy Slot Review

This is the buy edition of Evoplay's night-temple slot, and on the surface the only change is a red Bonus Buy button bolted to the left rail. Underneath it sits the same game reviewed at Legacy of the Sages: a 5x5 grid, 15 fixed lines paying left to right, and a Mystery Chain that turns a run of yin-yang symbols into either Wilds or cash prizes.

Two numbers actually differ between the editions, and they pull in opposite directions. Base RTP here is 96.14% against 96.02% in the original, which is backwards from how these pairs normally work, since the buy version is usually the one trimmed to pay for the button. The trade shows up on the ceiling instead: 4,041x total bet here, 4,095x there.

So the version with the shortcut is also the better version to spin normally. Only by 0.12 of a point, but it is a real inversion and an odd one.

It is night at the temple. Blue-tiled pagoda roofs cut into a deep purple sky, waterfalls glow pale lavender across the valley behind, and small red lanterns burn along a garden path on both sides of the reels. A string of firecrackers and a wind chime hang off the right pillar. On the left, under the Super, Mega and Mini plaques, a fat red urn spills gold coins onto the stones.

The reel panel is a deep maroon that lets the animal symbols carry the colour: a teal dragon with orange antlers and a burning third eye, a pale monkey face in a green frame, a gilded rabbit, a phoenix head in red and orange. The dragon lands in full-reel stacks and is easily the best-drawn thing on the board. Less good is what surrounds it. A, K, Q, J and 10 in flat art-deco lettering take up most of the 25 positions on an average spin, so this handsome Asian setting spends a lot of its time showing card letters.

Base spins are quiet in a way that takes adjusting to. Something pays a bit better than one spin in four, but the amounts barely register: three monkeys on a line give back one and a half times the stake, and that is an ordinary result rather than a bad one. The rhythm of a session is really just watching the middle three columns for yin-yangs to pile up, and most of the time they stop one short of a chain.

Which makes it an awkward game to grind. The jackpot plaques sit there in cash terms all session, ticking up and down with the stake, keeping the Super figure in the corner of the eye long after the maths has made clear it is not arriving. Free spins are where the thing wakes up, and they move fast: every chain is money, values stack across the grid, and eight spins are done in about ninety seconds. Buying is less a shortcut than the default way most people will end up playing this one, which is probably the honest read on the whole edition.

Priced fairly and put together with more care than most buy conversions. The menu is the best-behaved part: nothing to work out, nothing to avoid, and a toll of 0.22 of a point that counts as cheap for what the button does.

The weak spot is everything underneath it. Nine regular symbols topping out at 30x for five means the lines contribute close to nothing, so a session lives or dies on Money symbols, and a 4,041x cap is thin for a game that keeps an 1,888x jackpot on permanent display (those two get mixed up constantly, and the Super is the biggest single prize, not the ceiling). Anyone planning to spin this without pressing the button should still take this edition over the original, which is not a sentence that gets written often.