Showdown Saloon Slot
- Another Wild West slot that doesn’t looks as impressive as some
- Several features including respins, stacked symbols and free spins
- Not as exciting as I would have hoped
Microgaming have produced a new slot known as Showdown Saloon which has a theme based on, you guessed it, the Wild West. Now we’ve seen a lot of slots use this type of theme with some games like The Wild 3 slot taking things a bit further and adding a level of video-gaming to the slot to make things a bit more fun.
So, is this another fun slot? Well, not really. The design here is very bland, especially for a Wild West theme. You just have a 5×3 reel layout with some OK looking symbols and a pretty plain backdrop without any animations. This is really disappointing and hardly draws you in. I’ll discuss the features shortly to see if they can bring a bit more excitement. All you need to do to play the game is spin the reels to try and get a winning combination from left to right using the base symbols. These are listed as follows, ranked in ascending order based on their value:
- 10, Jack or Queen (lowest value)
- King or Ace
- Dice
- Alcohol
- Chips
- Gun
- Wild (highest value)
Showdown Saloon Slot Bonuses and Features
As you can see, there aren’t that many base symbols in the game and they’re also pretty low value. The Wild symbol, however, is worth significantly more than all the others and even pays for just a combination of 3. As you would expect, it substitutes for all other symbols in a winning combination apart from the Scatter symbol, also known as the Free Spins symbol.
Mystery Stacks Feature. Every reel in both the base game and the Free Spins Bonus has a stack of mystery symbols. A single game symbol will replace the stack of mystery symbols on each reel. On every regular base spin, the same symbol will replace the two mystery stacks on the farthest left, while all the remaining mystery stacks could be replaced by different symbols. Also, Free Spins symbols can replace mystery symbols in the base game. On each free spin, the same symbol replaced mystery symbols on all reels.
Re-Spin Feature. This is a feature that can be triggered by matching full symbol stacks which must happen on reels 2, 3 and 4. The full symbol stacks must be adjacent and start from the leftmost reel. Once the feature commences, the triggering stacks will be locked in place all the remaining reels will respin. If you manage to land additional adjacent matching full stacks another respin will be triggered. On every respin, mystery stacks will change to match the symbols in the triggering stacks. As you might expect, a respin will not trigger if all the reels are matching full stacks.
Free Spins Bonus. This is triggered by full stacks of Free Spins symbols which must be adjacent and start with the leftmost reel. If you manage to get 3 stacks, you’ll be awarded with 5 free spins but unfortunately no multiplier. If you land 4 stacks you’ll be given 10 free spins and be awarded a multiplier of 2x. Finally, landing a full 5 stacks of Free Spins symbols will give you 15 free spins with a 3x multiplier.
Conclusion
Showdown Saloon is an interesting game from Microgaming. The Mystery Stacks Feature sounded very promising but in my experience it just didn’t work that well and that’s a real shame because it’s the main stand-out feature in the slot. The respin feature is OK but doesn’t seem to trigger very often and the Free Spins Bonus is fairly average. I think they could have offered some more free spins here, perhaps 10, 15 and 20, or better multipliers perhaps starting at 2x then going up to 4x or even 5x. All in all, Showdown Saloon slot just isn’t that exciting both in how it plays and how it pays. It’s not very rewarding and I don’t think the features work that well, but if you disagree feel free to let us know down in the comments below.