Gonzo’s Quest Slot Game Review
Join explorer Gonzo Pizzaro as he searches through South America for the fabled lost city made of gold, El Dorado. The quest begins by placing your bet, based on your wager amount which starts at $0.01 and goes up to $50, then you choose your number of fixed pay lines you want to play. Gonzo’s Quest is not one of the most recent NetEnt slots to hit the market but is still one of the most popular with Lucky Nugget, Jackpot City and All Slots all offering free spins for loyal customers.
When it comes to game design, NetEnt totally rethought the way that slots were structured and came out with an exclusive avalanche style of gameplay that, in 2010 when the game was released, was wholly original and a brand new concept to the world of slots.
Next, when you hit the spin button, instead of spinning the 5 reels before you the symbols appear as blocks that start cascading down from above in what they call an avalanche style gameplay. When the avalanche ends the winning line combinations are identified and added up, but the fun starts here. Each winning line’s symbols explode and disappear, leaving an empty space that gets filled up by the symbols above it in the cascading nature of the reels.
Each time the lines fill back up, if there are any new winning lines, then these are added up into the winning amount and you get a multiplier for each round of new falling symbols filling in for exploded symbols. This goes on up to 5x multiplier and can earn you a pretty penny just in the normal gameplay.
That is not even getting into the bonus features available.
- Software – NetEnt
- Paylines – 20
- Reels – 5
- Min Bet – $0.01
- Max Bet – $50
- Jackpot – $125,000
- RTP – 95.97%
Slot Game Features
The features that you will encounter along Gonzo’s Quest for El Dorado include a wild symbol, a scatter, and what they call a Free Fall bonus round, which is basically a free spins round of gameplay. These exciting features are one of the reasons that online casino games have become so popular all round the world.
First of all, the wild symbol is just a question mark symbol, which makes it unique since all the other symbols in the game are Mayan characters that start with the low paying snakes and fish symbols and work their way up to the high paying gods symbols.
But the question mark, when landed in any pay line can fill in for any symbol and will calculate as the highest paying line that can be created using it. As a bonus, you not only can land on the wild symbol during your cascading spin but in each subsequent avalanche when the winning symbols explode and ones above them drop down to fill in. Wilds can appear as the symbols dropping down to fill in the empty spaces and don’t forget that with every round of avalanche your multiplier for all winning for that spin increases up to 5x for 4 successful winning rounds of avalanching symbols.
Bonus Game
Then there is the scatter symbol. This is called the Free Fall symbol but is essentially a gold coin with a face on it. When you land on 3 or more of these symbols in succession on a pay line, starting from the leftmost reel, you trigger the free fall bonus rounds to begin. The Free Fall bonus round triggers 10 free spins essentially.
The free spins come in the form of cascades of symbols, just like the regular gameplay, except with one major difference. The multiplier you can win for successive avalanches of winning symbols for one spin or one initial cascade of symbols as the field resets itself can go from 3x to 15x in increments of 3x instead of 1x up to 5x in the regular gameplay rounds.
This means that you can essentially get 15x your winning amount for a single spin that added up to being 4 or more avalanches with repeated winning pay-lines occurring one after another as the symbols drop down to fill in for exploded winning pay lines. We know this may sound kind of confusing, but you will get the hang of it fairly quickly once you start playing and figuring out what we are saying and take a couple of glances at the actual paytable for the unique set of symbols that fill up the reels.
Conclusion
Overall, this is a great game that breathes a fresh breath of air into a somewhat stale game design of your typical slots. It adds a new style that takes a few minutes to get used to, but once you get acclimated you will find this game a wonderful delight for spending some of your hard-earned gaming money and time. If you want to read or play any of the other slots that Gaming SA have reviewed, you can find the complete list in our online slots guide.
