Cool Jewels Pokie Machine
Anyone familiar with those arcade or mobile games where the aim is to connect matching jewel symbols will immediately recognise the inspiration for Cool Jewels from WMS Gaming.
This mobile optimised game that’s also found online in a desktop version, isn’t a conventional pokie, as there are no paylines, or reels as such, with players winning a prize whenever matching groups of at least 3 or more jewels are created, although there’s a couple of extra features such as wild symbols and a free spins game to bring in more into line with the sort of fruit machines that they may be more used to.
Like Bejeweled, or Candy Crush, the Cool Jewels video pokie has varying awards depending on how many symbols are grouped together, and any that make up a winning combination will disappear to be replaced by others, potentially over and over for lots of wins in a single spin.
Playing Cool Jewels
There’s snow and ice surrounding everything in this game, which is set out in an unusual layout, where the jewels are to the right side of the screen, in a 6 x 6 grid and the control buttons, along with information about how it works, are to the left side.
Punters can stake a low limit of just 0.50 on a spin, but the maximum stake of 200.00 means that Cool Jewels is also suitable for high rollers. The wins for connected jewels will increase each time a combination disappears and gets replaced by another, and there’s some useful thermometers to the sides that indicate how much will be paid per symbol. Naturally, the more symbols land in a group, the higher the rewards.
It doesn’t matter if the red hexagon, orange triangle, white diamond or green octagon turns up, as these and a few others, are all worth the same amount. It’s the way that payouts increase each time groups of symbols are destroyed that’s going to bring in the best wins, and as the meter to the side of the game starts to fill up, one section at a time, players who get the maximum of 12 consecutive sets removed will see wins increased by up to 50x from the base win of 0.01 coins for each symbol.
Cool Jewels
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Bonus Features
To move this online casino game on from the basic format of Bejeweled and similar titles, Cool Jewels has some bonus symbols that can blow up even more symbols or trigger extra rounds. We’ll start with the wilds, as each of these multicoloured jewels has a different effect on the outcome of a spin. The Unstable Wild will destroy any symbols connected to it, which means up to 8 jewels can disappear at a time, while the Shattering Wild removes any symbols from the horizontal and vertical lines from wherever it lands.
Shocking Wilds destroy all jewels in all symbol spaces across the diagonals from its centre, and it all gets a little more complicated if combinations of wilds appear at the same time. Whenever this occurs, the wilds remain in positions relative to each other and will move down the game with any successive win until a non-winning combination is landed.
In addition, they leave trails of ‘watermark’ symbols, in green, pink or blue, with a multiplier of up to 10x, or extra symbols destroyed.
Free Spins Bonus Round
A Bonus symbol will trigger some free spins if any 4 or more get destroyed at once. The number of extra spins awarded, depends on the number of Bonus symbols that started the round, as 4 symbols destroyed will equal 8 free spins, 5 of them will trigger 10 spins, if 6 Bonus symbols get removed, then 15 free games will commence and any 7 or more will see 20 free games play out. If 4 or more Bonus symbols retrigger the game, an extra 5 spins will be added to any remaining in the current round.
The Verdict
The Cool Jewels pokie is a slightly unusual twist on the theme, as in normal gameplay, an easy to follow sequence of events will lead to some nice wins, but once the unique bonus features are triggered, it can get a little complicated.
The different wild symbols will vibrate for a second before destroying the different patterns of symbols, but it all happens quite quickly and players may find that the feature is over before they realised it was about to begin. It’s still a nice way to get a payout though, and doesn’t change the fact that Cool Jewels video pokies from WMS Gaming is a nice, relaxing way to spend some time.