Diamond Doggies: Slot Overview
Humankind’s so-called best friend dogs hit the reels in Red Tiger‘s canine and shiny stone-themed online slot Diamond Doggies. The two topics are not a common mix, but this is online slots, so some original, imaginative thinking is no bad thing. Accompanying the rocks and the Rovers is a progressive symbol to wild effect, the odd multiplier or two if you’re lucky, respins, as well as free spins.
The first view of Diamond Doggies was a bit startling. Minorly startling in that the two main ideas here, diamonds and doggies, didn’t come across as an amazingly frictionless mix from an initial look. It was like the game was pulling hard in the direction of a classic Vegasy slot but equally hard in the direction of a loveable dog slot before snapping back together in a jumbled heap. The diamonds and dogs are linked by certain features, so Diamond Doggies did make more sense when seen holistically, but yeah, not sure. Different.
A 5-reel, 3-row playing area is where the doggies of the game have the chance to get it on. 20 paylines are provided for calculating wins, which pay left to right, beginning from the matrix’s leftmost reel. With only one way to play, users choose a stake of 10 c to $/€10 per spin and can expect a theoretical RTP value of 95.72% driven by a medium-high volatile math model.
Ten to Ace card ranks with paw prints on them are Diamond Doggies’ low pay symbols, giving players 2.5 to 3.5 times their bet for landing a 5-matching symbol combination. Do the same with the 4 high-pay Doggie character symbols, and the rewards are 5 to 25 times the bet. Diamond Wilds and Doggie Wilds substitute for all of the paying symbols and land on all reels except the leftmost reel.
Diamond Doggies: Slot Features
A progress bar with 3 steps sits above reels 2, 3, 4, and 5, representing each of the 4 Doggie symbols. From left to right, it shows the highest to lowest value Doggie symbol. Landing a Diamond Wild symbol fills one step of the progress bar above the reel it hit on. Filling up a progress bar transforms the corresponding Doggie symbol into a wild on reels 2, 3, 4, and 5. In the base game, filled progress bars are reset on the following spin.
After filling a progress bar, if no Doggie Wilds were part of a win, a respin is awarded. All Doggie Wilds and Diamond Wilds are held for respins. During respins, if new Doggie Wilds land, they are also held. Respins repeat until any Doggie Wild is used in a win.
Diamond Wilds may land on respins, too. If another progress bar is filled during a respin, that corresponding Doggie symbol also turns wild. Landing a Diamond Wild on a reel where the progress bar is already filled increases the multiplier of the respective Doggie Wild by +1. Multipliers apply to all wins in which the wild is part of. Multipliers are multiplied when more than one is part of the same win.
Free Spins
A total of 10 free spins are awarded by landing scatter symbols on the leftmost, middle, and rightmost reel. Scatters do not land in free spins. Doggie progress transfers over to free spins, and filling a progress bar in free spins converts the linked Doggie symbol into a wild on reels 2, 3, 4, and 4 for the remainder of the feature. Filled progress bars reset only when free spins are complete. Landing a Diamond Wild on a reel where the progress bar is already filled increases the multiplier of the respective Doggie Wild by +1 for the remainder of the round.
Diamond Doggies: Slot Verdict
Diamond Doggies was an odd mix, almost as if Red Tiger had the parts of two incomplete games lying about the office and decided to mash them together to make a slot out of it. The result isn’t terrible, but it’s a bit of a mismatch in a split personality game that is part classic old-school diamond slot and part pooch. Not that it doesn’t work; it just doesn’t work exceptionally well. Maybe if the diamond patterned wallpaper had more life to it, maybe depicting something more dog-related. But then Diamond Doggies might have leaned too much into canine territory and neglected its diamond aspect. Hard to say. Moving on.
The features in Diamond Doggies did gel together quite well. Filling progress bars happened regularly enough to keep the base game moving along, transforming Doggie symbols to wilds, throwing in the occasional respin. While multipliers are a possibility, they might not drop in great abundance in the base game. This is where free spins get a chance to step things up. That’s because progress bars are persistent in the bonus round, so the chance of increasing multipliers is theoretically better. Better still, multipliers multiply each other when more than one is in a win, which would help explain why Diamond Doggies has a max multiplier calculated at 10,000x.
Better be hoping you can enter free spins with a good level of progression stored already, or just get lucky, cos without retriggers, those 10 free spins can fly by in a haze of fluff and ticks. Anyway, Diamond Doggies provided moments of interest and could be up the street of players into doggies, or diamonds, or both.
Mediocre
Diamond Doggies is a bit of an odd mix, but mechanically, at least, it can pull its parts together quite alright.
