Sweet Alchemy Gameplay and Bonus Features
This is a 5x5 candy crush game in which you win by matching clusters of 4 symbols or more, and they make room for new ones, so you can keep getting new clusters indefinitely. But as you do so, winning Candies contribute to the Sugar Rush Meter, and as it fills up it starts adding Wilds to your reels. They can be normal Wilds, Striped Wilds or Dotted Wilds, and the latter two have an added function of removing symbols from the board when they're involved in a winning cluster.
If you fill the Sugar Rush Meter with a total of 38 Candies during a single game round (a spin), you'll trigger the Mix the Elixir Free Rounds which features 3 Candy Spells. Collect additional Candies to earn up to 7 Candy Spells. Available spells are: Sugar Bombs that explode random symbols, Mixed Candy that shuffles symbols to create wins, and Sweet Surprise Wilds that replace random symbols. The goal is to collect the required symbols by winning with them, and there are three Star Levels. Level 1 activates the Elixir of Power Bonus Round, and Levels 2 and 3 each improve the prizes available in the bonus round.
Mix the Elixir Free Round is played on a 9x9 board instead of 5x5, and after that you get to play the Elixir of Power Bonus Round, you're picking chocolates from a 5x5 board, they reveal Elixirs, and you must match 3 Elixirs to win a prize. You can win up to 10x your bet or up to 5x your total win. But that's not all. After every Elixir of Power Bonus Round, you will progress through the map, where you'll find Treasure Chests with cash prizes.
Candies actually pay quite well when you consider how common wins are and that this is a game in which you can get so many winning clusters during one spin. Clusters of 4 only pay from 0.10x to 1.50x your bet, but prizes for clusters of 8 or more range from 2x to 30x your bet, and that's really something, and that's before the bonus features get triggered. You can win up to 3000x your bet on a single spin in this game. Theoretical return to player (RTP) is 96.52% and the variance seems to be medium.