Golden Gate

San Francisco’s iconic bridge finally receives some love from the slot community. The theme is certainly not too common, even though the bridge itself is a well-known monument. Merkur Gaming has built the slot with a standard set up of five reels, and what seems like a very conventional slot setup in other ways as well. Does the game offer any surprise or is it simply riding with a simple theme?

Theme

The background is composed of waterways, the bridge itself, and other landscapes, all painted with the colours of a setting sun. Though there are sound effects and what seems like music they only seem to be in play whenever the reels are spun, leaving a rather annoying after effect. The symbols are a combination of themes that have brought fame to California - trucks that cross the bridge, the oranges that they ferry, the bridge itself, cars, cable cars and special symbols.

Betting Options and Functions

The win lines connect from left to right, following the five reels. There are ten in total, which means there are no traffic jams on the screen. Betting is controlled via bet selector, which give a dozen or so options between 0.10 and 100 coins per spin. Wins scale to the bet, as is natural. The bridge works as a wild, substituting for all other symbols and also doubling any win it creates.

Jacks, Queens, Kings, and Aces are the lowest level symbols, paying out between 10 and 150 times your bet per line. The oranges and lanterns offer up to 250 times your bet, the blue car offer 500 times the coins, and finally, the red truck is the most valuable symbol which offers up to a thousand times your line bet.

Features

There are two features here. The first one is the gamble feature, which is pretty much the same as in all other Merkur games. Bet on cards and double or quadruple your pot if you guess right, or with the ladder system where you can go up or down depending on your luck.

The main bonus feature is the San Francisco lottery. Once you hit three cable cars, which is the scatter, you get a chance to win the main pot. This can go as high as 20 000 credit. Unfortunately, there is no minigame or anything else here: the game simply gives you a random win. Still, it is usually quite a nice amount of cash when you manage to land it.

Our Take

Golden Gate suffers from not having any good bonus features. A high money lottery pot is nice, but it also suffers from not launching very often. Free spins or something else of the like would have served the game well. Still, with luck, you might be able to cash in with just the normal line wins. These do not suffer from high variance, and with some luck, in gambling, you can create pretty decent wins. Try in demo mode first!