Slots are becoming increasingly interactive and try to offer an ‘experience’ beyond the basic. Gem Rocks seems to be a regressive step that offers a beautiful, but an unbelievably dull game. Perhaps it is looking for those players that what to play, rather than experience. If this is the target market, then it will have succeeded admirably.

I am a great fan of Yggdrasil’s content and I tried really hard to find some positives in this offering, but this game left me as stony-faced as the Monster Rocks themselves. All the features are in the base game but they just aren’t interesting enough to keep me here. The profile feels pretty volatile in that when the features were hitting the pays weren’t great and it left me with little hope that I (or the average player) would recover any significant part of the house edge. Ultimately, if you’re going to design a volatile game then make it for hardcore players, as they are the ones that will want to play it… Aristocrat do this pretty well. If you’re going to design a game that looks fluffy and accessible, then at least give the maths profile that feels like it gives value back. Lastly, if you’re going to introduce any sort of characterisation, then at least try and draw out the narrative to give some purpose to their inclusion as it wouldn’t have made any difference to this title if, instead of the Rock Monsters, it was just large symbols that popped up during the feature.