Big Apple Wins Slot – Free Demo

Twenty lines under a neon skyline

Big Apple Wins is an online slot by Booming Games. Its feature list is short: Stacked Symbols, Free Spins and a Gamble round. Big Apple Wins travels to a locale that is orders of magnitude balmier than outer space – the avenues of New York. But rest assured: Booming has contrived to stuff plenty of urban landmarks into Big Apple Wins. The Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building both do jobs on the reels rather than merely decorating them.

It begins with a neon kind of appearance where the Statue of Liberty encounters Broadway, and on the subject of backdrop, the vista is fairly tidy. The entire board is gleaming against the skyline. The session I logged opened at a balance of 100,000.00. Though the game dates from January 2018 and shows its age, it is adequate. There is no feature buy here, and no multiplier attaches to the free spins.

Pizza slices at the bottom, sevens at the top

Shifting behind the curtain, Big Apple Wins arrives with a modest array of stats, which means an RTP figure of 96%. Where one spin produces more than one win, the amounts are added together and credited as a single total. The arrangement is traditional. The action unfolds on a game panel composed of 5 reels and 3 rows, and players are paid when matching symbols land left to right on an active payline from the left-hand side. The matching symbols have to land on consecutive reels. Only the highest win per line is paid. The total bet is the bet per line multiplied by the number of lines you leave switched on. The player may activate anywhere between 1 and 20 paylines. The cash figures printed in the paytable move with both, so they climb as lines are added.

The symbols are an urban assortment. The Empire State Building serves as the Scatter, and three of them anywhere pay 10x the stake in their own right. They are divided between low pay pizza slices and apples worth 2.5x the stake for five of a kind, and mid pay taxis and Broadway masks worth 5x the bet for five of a kind. Three pizza slices or apples return 0.05x the stake, and four return 0.5x. Crowning the table are the Blue, Silver and Red Sevens, where five of them will earn 10 times the stake, and to help win, 1 type of wild appears, too – the Statue of Liberty Wild, which stands in for all regular pay symbols to finish winning lines. Those sevens tie it to the rest of the studio's shelf: Vegas Wins and Booming Bars are Booming Games titles as well, and Booming Bars is the studio's classic seven-symbol machine.

What Booming actually put in here

Naturally, there are a few familiar matters occurring here, but a couple of twists of the screw as well, so buckle in, and I'll cruise through them. I never took the Gamble, so every win quoted here is the win as it was paid.

Stacks of three, Scatters excluded

Arriving partially or entirely on a reel, symbols come in stacks of 3 identical symbols, and Scatters are not stacked. A full stack covers all three rows of a reel with the same symbol.

The Statue of Liberty fills in

Both for payouts and for triggering the Free Spins, the Statue of Liberty Wild substitutes for all symbols except the Scatter. In the frame I kept, it stood in on reel 2 to complete a Taxi line for 450.00 at a 200.00 stake. It pays on its own as well. One of my larger base game hits, 3,400.00 on spin 73, came from stacked symbols with the Wild filling in. That is 50x the total bet for five, 20x for four and 2x for three.

Ten free spins, then ten more

Landing 3 or more Empire State Building Scatters anywhere on the board awards 10 Free Spins, and landing 3 or more again during the round retriggers it, adding 10 more spins. Two of my five rounds retriggered and ran to 20 spins. Bet and line count are frozen for the duration. Mine stayed locked at 200.00 across 20 lines in every round. A meter displays the spins remaining, and a banner displays the round total at the end. The first trigger came on spin 122, then 97 spins passed before the third arrived and only 10 before the fourth.

The double-or-nothing screen

The Gamble is a double-or-nothing round, if you're prepared to risk a bit of money on the win you have just been paid: 50/50, payout 100%. It plays out on a separate screen, with the win at stake shown as Current Win and double that shown as Possible Win. A correct guess doubles the Current Win and a mistaken one forfeits it, and you can go up to 10 gambles in a row, or until winnings hit a ceiling the rules state only as a currency sum. A wrong guess drops you straight back to the reels. Collect exits at any point. It can also be taken after landing three or more Scatters. It is not available during Autoplay, and Free Spin winnings cannot be gambled.

400 spins at 200 a spin

On the whole, Big Apple Wins was a plain Booming game to play. The balance peaked at 102,100.00 on spin 11 and bottomed out at 80,110.00. It was sparse on comic elements and sparse on features to absorb, and there's a pleasant rhythm to the proceedings and nothing sinister to report. The longest run without a win was 17 spins, ending on spin 42. However, it didn't make quite as favourable an impression as the neon promised. There's only the thin feature set to fault really, since apart from the meagre extras, Big Apple Wins' features operate without a hitch. The rules put no cap on retriggers, so a round can in principle keep adding ten spins at a time.

So then, the chief drawback is the classic 5x3 mixture feels a little outdated, as the sevens and the city symbols rest awkwardly together. But something about Big Apple Wins didn't sit entirely right. This is merely an observation. Who knows, other players might be all over the neon skyline notion, or not even register it.

When the stacks, the Wild and all the rest of it are going your way, it's simpler to overlook this side of Big Apple Wins. Across the session I wagered 80,000.00 and won 60,290.00. Over 400 spins at 200.00 a spin the game returned 75.4%, with 93 paying spins and 50 of those paying less than the stake. That works out at 23% of spins paying anything at all. It was not going my way for long. The balance closed at 80,290.00. Five Free Spins rounds arrived. Together they paid 22,600.00. The best of them retriggered to 20 spins and worth 8,000.00, or 40x the stake, and between them they comprised 37% of everything won. The second retriggered round, on spin 317, also ran to 20 spins and paid 4,400.00, or 22x the stake.

Minty Slots Verdict: Four hundred spins gave back 75.4% against a stated 96%, and the gap is where the free spins live – 37% of everything the reels paid came out of five rounds, two of which had to retrigger to get there. Between them the base game is pizza slices and taxis at a quarter of the stake, which is a long way to walk for three Empire State Buildings.

The part that still worked

Big Apple Wins' slightly outdated visuals meant the game didn't feel quite as unified a package as the theme implies, but it tossed up a number of thrills during the test runs. My four biggest wins of the session all landed on free spin rounds. Stacked symbols are enjoyable.