Diamond Empire

Diamonds are a serious business. Their clear look and hardened nature made them a coveted material for many types of jewellery, and even beyond that, the fact that diamonds are incredibly difficult to break makes them useful in several industries – or, it would, if they weren’t so prohibitively expensive. As humanity’s desire for diamonds grows, so has the need to supply it – whether through mines in Africa, or synthetic diamonds, artificially created by scientists and indistinguishable from the real thing. Diamonds aren’t only a girl’s best friend – if you have a large diamond, everyone wants to be your friend. So what better way to lure people in than a whole empire full of them?

Once again, we find ourselves unable to resist Microgaming alluring invitations. Diamond Empire offers a 3×3 playing field with 15 fixed paylines, meaning you aren’t allowed to turn them on or off to adjust your wager. You can find Wilds present all throughout the reels, but there is no free spins bonus. You can find several bonus wheel Scatters, which can activate a rather lucrative, if boring bonus.

If there’s one thing we dislike about titles with smaller reels, is that they’re more or less always trying to emulate old physical machines. Visually, this means either a lot of fruits or a lot of bars on the field, and Diamond Empire falls more into the latter category.

To be fair on Microgaming, the backdrop drawing is absolutely gorgeous – we can only imagine how impressive an actual, live version sculpted in ice or actual diamonds might actually look like. We’re content to simply look upon it and dream, for the time being, anyways. The gameplay is another thing we personally dislike about these titles, and that’s their general absence of special features. We consider Diamond Empire to be leagues ahead of certain titles that give you just five paylines to work with on a 3×3 playing field, which is going too far. However, it also embraces this absence of special features – there are Wilds, but no free spins anywhere in sight, and the only thing to spice up gameplay is just a lucky wheel that can land at a certain point to give you a solid score. Great for wins but not that much in terms of engaging gameplay.

You can play Diamond Empire on a wager between $0.15 up to $15 per spin. The biggest scores you can win in this title both come from rare, but exciting occurrences. The first comes from a triple diamond Wild win, which gives a rather sinful 666x your bet. The second comes from the bonus wheel which you can activate through Scatters, whose top prize sits at 888x your total stake, making it even more lucrative – but, by extent, also far rarer compared to the first one. And make no mistake, they are rare scores – the title has a 95.8% RTP with a high volatility, so you will spend a lot of cash while you get those jackpots – but they’ll be more than worth it at the end.

We really wish there was more to talk about when it came to symbols, but what you see is mostly what you get. The icon design is very clearly taking inspiration from physical machines, which we find rather annoying. What were once limitations of machines are now being implemented for the sake of nostalgia itself. Having different bars, lucky sevens and cherries in a title focused on diamonds really doesn’t have that much of a reason beyond appealing to people who want to go back to something we’ve advanced past already. There’s a single special feature in Diamond Empire. Anytime you collect three or more Scatters, you are given a single spin on the bonus wheel. The wheel can land on a myriad of cash prizes, with the highest being 888x your wager. There is also a minor bonus related to Wilds – as they can appear with a multiplier of 2x or 4x depending if a win had one or two Wilds in itself.