Crystal Sun

Crystal Sun Slot Review

A blue-teal nebula curls around dark, rocky planets, and a faint glow burns behind the chrome lettering like a star trying to get through the haze. Crystal Sun asks one thing of you and pays you back for it: watch the middle reels, because they’re the only place anything happens. That’s not a criticism. Play’n GO have built an entire game out of three reels and the wilds that land on them, and it holds together better than plenty of games with five times the features.

The game runs on a 5×3 grid with 10 fixed paylines, at 96.6% RTP, mid-to-high volatility, and a ceiling of 4,000x the bet. Next to the busy grids of Legend of the Ice Dragon or Blazin’ Bullfrog, it’s a small machine built around a single idea, and the idea is a good one.

Base Game Symbols and Pays

Wins pay left to right across the ten fixed lines, starting from the leftmost reel, and the game also evaluates lines the other way, so a combination reading right to left counts too. Only the highest combination counts on each line either way. When several lines win in the same round, everything is added together and paid at the end of it.

Symbol wins need a combination without gaps. There’s no scatter and no separate bonus symbol anywhere in the game. Every win that isn’t a plain payline win comes out of the wild mechanic, which has a section of its own below.

The paytable is planet-sized at the top and modest further down. All values are multiples of the total bet:

• Blue diamond: 4x for three, 8x for four, 16x for five
• 77: 2x for three, 4x for four, 8x for five
• Green planet: 1x for three, 2x for four, 4x for five
• Orange and red planets: 0.5x for three, 1.5x for four, 3x for five
• Yellow and purple planets: 0.4x for three, 1x for four, 2x for five

The premium tier thins out quickly. Below the diamond and the 77, everything pays less than the bet for a three-of-a-kind, which tells you where the money is meant to come from: the wilds, not the planets. Even a five-of-a-kind diamond is 16x, a fraction of what a single multiplier wild chain can produce.

Three different wild symbols exist, and all of them substitute for every other symbol:

• Sun wild (x1): a plain substitute, no multiplier attached
• x2 wild: substitutes and doubles re-spin wins
• x3 wild: substitutes and triples re-spin wins

None of the wilds pay anything on their own. Their value is in what they trigger and what they multiply, not in lining up three of them. The multiplier versions only matter during re-spins, which is exactly where the game wants them.

Expanding Wilds and Wild Re-Spins

Wilds land on reels two, three and four only, and they never stay small: every wild that lands expands to fill its entire reel. The moment that happens, the expanded wild locks in place and awards a single re-spin to hunt for another one.

The full sequence runs like this:

• A wild lands on reel two, three or four and expands to the full reel
• The expanded wild sticks and awards one re-spin
• A new wild during that re-spin expands, sticks alongside the first, and grants another re-spin
• The mode ends the moment a re-spin passes with no new wild
• The cap is three re-spins in a row, reached when all three middle reels fill with expanding wilds on consecutive spins

Every step of that ladder is free. The re-spins cost nothing, the wilds that triggered them stay locked where they landed, and each new wild only adds to what’s already standing. A chain that dies on the first re-spin still cost the game nothing to give and pays whatever the expanded wild earned on its own lines.

Get all three middle reels standing wild at once and the whole centre of the screen is one substitute block. Line wins start paying from both edges of it, in both directions, and with five planets stacked at the sides there’s a paying combination on nearly every row.

The multipliers are what turn a sticky-wild chain into something serious. The x2 and x3 wilds multiply re-spin wins, and when several of them are on screen together they combine, stacking towards a maximum of 9x on a single win.

That 9x is doing the heavy lifting behind the game’s top prize, and it’s the reason the middle reels matter more than anything else on screen. The 4,000x ceiling is a long way above anything the plain paytable offers, and the only road there runs through a full board of multiplied wilds.

That’s the entire feature set. No free spins, no picking game, no wheel, no bonus buy. One mechanic carries the whole game, and the design trusts it completely. The bet can’t be changed while a round is running, so a re-spin chain plays out at whatever stake started it.

Our Honest Verdict

Overall Rating: 7.7/10

This is a waiting game that pays you for waiting well. Almost every spin is five planets drifting through a nebula, and then one wild lands in the middle and the whole picture changes. The reason to choose it is exactly that: a single mechanic doing the work of five, and doing it properly.

The strength is the run of three. Watching reels two, three and four fill wild one after the other, with the multiplier wilds stacking towards 9x, builds more tension than most feature-stuffed games ever manage, and the whole board paying both ways when it lands is the moment the design was built around.

The weakness is everything outside that run. The paytable underneath is thin, most spins are pure downtime, and there’s no second feature to break it up. If you want variety, you’ll exhaust this quickly. If you like one strong idea, dressed in some of the nicer cosmic art on a 5×3 grid, the nebula’s worth the trip.

Crystal Sun FAQs

• What is the RTP of Crystal Sun?

  Crystal Sun runs at an RTP of 96.6%.
• Is Crystal Sun high volatility?

  Crystal Sun sits in the mid-to-high volatility range, so wins can run dry between the bigger wild-driven results.
• How many paylines does Crystal Sun have?

  Crystal Sun is a five-reel game with 10 fixed paylines. Wins pay in both directions, and only the highest combination counts on each line.
• What is the grid size of Crystal Sun?

  Crystal Sun plays on a 5×3 grid with five reels and three rows.
• How do the wild re-spins in Crystal Sun work?

  Wilds land on reels two, three and four only, and always expand to fill the full reel. Each expanded wild sticks in place and awards a single re-spin. If a new wild lands during that re-spin, it expands, sticks and grants another re-spin; the mode ends when a re-spin brings no new wild.
• How many re-spins can you get in Crystal Sun?

  The most the game allows is three re-spins in a row, which requires every one of the three middle reels to fill with an expanding wild on consecutive spins.
• When is Crystal Sun released?

  The release date of Crystal Sun is 24 April 2019.
• What is the maximum win on Crystal Sun?

  The maximum win on Crystal Sun is 4,000x your bet.