How We Test and Rate Casino Slots

How we test games: we play the free demo, log the mechanics spin by spin, and rely on published Pragmatic Play figures rather than affiliate marketing claims.

How we review Gems Bonanza

Every review on this site starts in the free demo, not with a press release. Before we write a word about Gems Bonanza, we load the Pragmatic Play demo, play through enough spins to see the core loop behave, open every in-game Game Rules panel, and record what the game actually shows on screen. When an affiliate page and the in-game panel disagree, the panel wins. That is the single rule that shapes everything below.

We test the demo, not our luck. A demo runs on virtual credits with the same maths as the real game, so it is the honest place to watch how clusters form, how often the modifiers fire, and how rarely the Gold Fever meter fills organically. What a demo cannot do is prove a payout figure, so we never present a short session as a rigorous measurement.

Our testing process, step by step

The workflow is deliberately repeatable so any reader could redo it. Here is what a review pass looks like from start to finish.

Load the demo	Open the tokenless demo, confirm the play balance, and note the game version and codename shown on screen.
Read the panels	Step through all eight Game Rules pages and record the grid size, RTP, volatility label, bet range, and every modifier by colour.
Log the spins	Play a sample of spins and count how often modifiers trigger and whether Gold Fever fires. We flag the sample as small and unscientific.
Test the bonus buy	Buy the feature a few times to see what 100x the base bet actually returns, then judge whether it is worth it.
Cross-check specs	Match every number against Pragmatic Play's published page and note where the official RTP differs from the demo build.
Score and write	Set the rating, write honest cons, and publish with the numbers a reader can verify.

Which sources we trust

Not all sources deserve equal weight, so we rank them, and we lean on the top of the list far harder than the bottom. Understanding this hierarchy tells you why our numbers sometimes differ from a random affiliate table.

At the top sits primary evidence we can see for ourselves: the in-game Game Rules panels and the behaviour we watch in the demo. These are the closest thing to the game telling us the truth, so a figure read straight off the panel, like the 96.55% RTP or the $0.20 to $240.00 bet range, overrides anything second-hand.

Next come the studio's own published materials. Pragmatic Play is a licensed B2B studio with Malta Gaming Authority and UK Gambling Commission supplier licences, and its games are RNG-tested by Gaming Laboratories International, so its official game page is a strong corroborating source. We link to it once where it belongs. When the official page and the demo disagree, for example the official 96.51% versus the demo's 96.55%, we report both rather than pick one silently.

Below that we place independent aggregators and databases, used only for context and always unnamed. They are useful for a rough sense of how the wider audience scores a game, so we might say aggregators land it around 8 out of 10, but we never treat a single third-party figure as fact. At the very bottom sit casino promo pages and affiliate copy, which we treat as marketing until a primary source backs the claim. If nothing does, we write that the number is not confirmed.

How we set the rating

A score is only useful if you know what feeds it. Ours is a single number out of 10 that weighs the things a player actually feels: how often the base game does something, whether the marquee feature is a genuine hook or a mirage, the RTP you are likely to get at a real casino, and how the maths treat a normal bankroll over time.

We do not reward a big headline multiplier that almost never lands, and we mark a game down when its best money is gated behind a level most players never clear. A generous demo session does not lift the score, and a cold one does not sink it, because variance over a handful of spins tells you nothing. The rating reflects the game as designed, not the run we happened to have. Where we would steer you away from something, such as an operator running the lowest RTP build, we say so in plain words. Spot an error in our workings? Tell us through the contact page and we will correct it.

Our Review Method: How We Test Gems Bonanza