Honey Gems is a unique slot game developed by Playtech, featuring a hexagonal honeycomb-style grid with 61 symbol positions. The game employs a cluster pays mechanism, where wins are formed by matching 5 or more symbols in adjacent cells. The theme revolves around bees, honey, fruits, and gems, set against a countryside backdrop with blue skies and colorful flowers.
The game's symbol set includes four gemstones in purple, green, blue, and red as lower-paying symbols. Medium-paying symbols are represented by fruits: blueberries, grapes, cherries, and strawberries. The highest-paying symbol is the queen bee. The Wild Multiplier Symbol, depicted as a golden honeycomb, substitutes for all regular symbols and plays a crucial role in the game's features.
Honey Gems offers several engaging bonus features:
- Wild Multiplier Symbol: This golden honeycomb wild lands with a 2x multiplier and can appear anywhere on the grid. It becomes active when it's part of a winning cluster.
- Sticky Respins: Triggered when a Wild Multiplier Symbol appears alongside a winning cluster. The Wild Multiplier and all instances of the winning symbol become sticky, while the rest of the positions respin. The feature continues as long as new matching symbols or wilds land. The Wild Multiplier's value increases by 1 for each respin after the first.
- Honey Queen Free Spins: Activated by landing 4 or more Scatter Symbols (beehives). Players can receive 6, 8, 10, or 12 free spins for 4, 5, 6, or 7 scatters respectively. During this feature, sticky Wild Multipliers are added to the reels and remain throughout the free spins. The multipliers never reset between spins, potentially leading to significant wins.
- Bonus Buy: Players have the option to purchase 6, 8, or 10 free spins for 75x, 150x, or 300x the bet, respectively.
The game's RTP is 95.46% in its default version, with alternative versions offering 93.58% and 91.05%. Honey Gems is characterized by high volatility, with a maximum potential win of 2,749.3x the bet. The betting range is wide, accommodating both casual players and high rollers, with stakes from 0.1 to 500 per spin.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Honey Gems is its innovative hexagonal grid layout, which sets it apart from traditional slot games. This unique structure, combined with the cluster pays mechanism and the escalating multipliers in the bonus features, creates a distinctive and potentially rewarding gaming experience.