The reel speed is well timed also and when you factor in all the additional animations, the overall game cycle is perfect.
The wins are reinforced well with some nice connecting animations and the game smartly avoids rewarding stinker pays. Sounds are as you’d expect high quality and fit well with the overall Aztecan theme. A nice mix of what I can only describe as orchestral jungle sounds and panpipes. I did find the occasional grunts of Gonzalo slightly annoying but they didn’t happen all that often. Overall the presentation and packaging of the game is flawless. The one criticism that I have is that the HTML5 version is less than stellar. There is nothing particularly wrong with it per se, but a lot of the whistles and bells from the desktop version are missing and performance seems far too slow. Given how good NetEnt’s recent mobile variants are (see Aliens), it makes me think that Gonzo’s Quest was one of the early To-Go titles that didn’t quite reach its full potential.
The mechanics of Gonzo’s Quest are pretty basic to be honest. The key feature is that of the ‘Avalanche Reels’ or to you and me, cascading reels.
I’m starting to dislike game developers who wrap up well known mechanics into new and frankly needless handles purely so the marketing department has something new to spin.
The bonus game is basically a free spin feature but they’ve called it ‘Freefall’ so, you know, it’s different from all the other free spin bonus features out there A really neat addition to both the base game and bonus game however is that they have a win line multiplier which increases with the more win lines you connect. The use of the multiplier really puts emphasis on the base game wins and really draws the player in as you start to analyse the game window to see what wins lines you have and what potential wins you’ll get after the Avalanche. In the Bonus game the multiplier increases again meaning that if you manage to chain together 3 or 4 combinations you can be looking at 9x or 15x bet multiplier (respectively). The great thing about the game maths is that chaining together 4 cascading wins isn’t an infrequent event. I can’t recall if at the time that Gonzo’s Quest went live this feature was widely adopted in other games, but regardless NetEnt have taken it and made it very special.
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