Sweet Alchemy

It’s not often that we talk about the way slots open, but most games usually don’t have an actual tutorial. Instead, they throw you in the deep end, give you the information tab to read through, and let you have your fun. Play’n Go, however, seems intent to make 2018 their year, as high production quality continues to shine through even more. The tutorial walks you through the basics of how the cluster wins work as well as through all the bonuses, but the real genius is that it sells you the thrill of winning big, presenting an ideal scenario where it all works out and you walk off with a giant win before putting you back into normal gameplay. It gives players a taste of victory, and it puts you in the mindset to go and get it. Sweet Alchemy gives players a 5×5 playing field in which wins don’t follow paylines – instead, wins occur when four or more of the same icon are adjacent to each other, and thanks to the cascading reels, new symbols fall in its place, allowing you to theoretically chain together plenty of wins. And you want to chain wins, because it fills your sugar meter, which rewards a wide variety of bonuses.

This is probably a game you shouldn’t play if you’re on a diet. On the other hand, if you have a sweet tooth, this should be literal heaven on earth for you. Various candies, a sweet elixir, chocolates in the bonus round. We can understand why the meter is called the Sugar Rush, because there’s no way not to look at this without getting a strong desire to gorge yourself on some tasty treats. It’s not the first game to do a candy paradise like this as a theme, but we have to be honest, it easily ranks among the top three that make us want to eat something sweet.

On the gameplay side of things, it feels familiar enough if you’ve ever played a slot with cascading reels, while at the same time, it improves the systems you usually find in those games to make it stand out all the more. You don’t have single Wild, instead, you have three different Wilds, with each one doing something different. You have a meter to fill up, and once you do, it unlocks several spells to keep your winning streak going. On top of that meter, activating a feature also allows you to collect specific symbols to power up the bonus at the end of it. The prizes are awesome, and at the end of all that, it adds another win on top of that with the map and treasure chest if you get lucky. The whole title just feels like its taking one step further than it has to and it’s awesome.

You can play this slot for as little as $0.10 up to $100 per bet. It has a high volatility with the maximum win of 3,000x your stake which is rather difficult to achieve, but we guarantee you will have a blast getting to it either way. The cascading reels do a great job at letting you generally predict how turns will go, and the bonuses do a good job at changing things around to make it not so predictable.

There are lots of different shaped candies, though they don’t really have any set shapes that would look familiar. Instead, it’s a whole bag of jelly with different colours and shapes that populate the regular reel and each one that is part of a win fills a meter called the Sugar Rush meter.

Once the meter is filled, the reel transform from a 5×5 to a 9×9 playing field. For that duration, you can get several spells to help you out. One shuffles symbols to create new winning combinations, one explodes random symbols on the reels, and the last one has Wilds replace several icons on the playing field. And there are different Wilds in play, as well. You have a regular Wild, Striped Wild which removes an entire row or column it is in when it is part of a winning combination, and Dotted Wild which picks a random symbol and removes all of them from the playing field.

The spells are useful at prolonging your wins, and once the meter is filled, you can go and collect different symbols. Collecting enough will advance your level. You need at least the first level to go to the Elixir of Power bonus game, in which you pick through chocolates to uncover which elixir you get, and by extent, what prize you get. The prizes get better the more levels you have, so ideally, you want level three for that juicy 10x total win, which is hands down usually the biggest score you can get.