Bounty Gold is a cowperson-themed slot set in the Wild West that sees players spinning through a feature-free base game on the way to a streak respins bonus round. It sounds pretty uneventful when put like that, and to be honest, it is pretty uneventful in practice as well. Bounty Gold is one of those games a small brand-new studio might test the waters with, not a well-established outfit like Pragmatic Play that you expect more out of. From theme to features, Bounty Gold is plain fare, though its respins feature unlocks up to four consecutive grid matrices, plus there are several multipliers and jackpots thrown in for good measure, so let's see.
Played using 5 reels and 25 paylines, a windy frontier town is the setting for Bounty Gold where the game grid sits in the middle of a dusty thoroughfare surrounded by the bank and saloon. It's a pretty handy set-up. Just cash your paycheck after rounding up cattle at the bank, then mosey across the street to spend it on whatever forms of entertainment takes your fancy before clip-clopping home on your horse. Bounty Gold's graphics are cheerfully passable; the view, like the rest of the game, is acceptable without being exceptional in any conceivable way.
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Available on any device, Bounty Gold allows players to set bets from 25 p/c to $/€125 per paid game round. It's a highly volatile Wild West ramble, possessing a default stand-up RTP value of 96.5%, though beware this can be dropped to less generous settings. It's worth taking a moment or two to click through the paytable to verify which return value you may have.
Since there are no features in the base game, thrills and coins are caused solely by landing winning combinations of three to five matching symbols across one of the 25 fixed paylines. Symbols are stock Western icons, such as J-A royals, horseshoes, hats, a male and a female gunslinger. The four higher value symbols are worth payouts of 3 to 8 times the stake for landing a full winning line of matching symbols. Lastly, we've got a wild symbol, landing on reels 2, 3, or 4 to substitute for anything except special money symbols, covered below.
Well, there's nothing in the base game to raise Bounty Gold's tempo, and the only feature is a money respin round. Landing 6 or more money symbols triggers this feature which moves the action away from the base game to a screen covered in four 5x3 matrices. One is active, while the other three are locked to start with.
Once underway, 3 respins are awarded, and money symbols stick in position when they land while resetting the number of spins back to 3. Opening up the other grid matrices is a case of landing as many money symbols as possible. If a total of 9, 18, or 26 money symbols hit, then the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th matrices are unlocked.
As another sweetener, filling all positions on a single matrix awards a jackpot. So, filling grid numbers 1, 2, 3, or 4 awards a jackpot worth 25x, 50x, 500x, or 5,000x the bet, respectively. Wait, there's more; grids 2, 3, and 4 also have a multiplier of x2, x3, and x4. All values collected on these grids are increased by the applicable multiplier. However, if a total of 44 money symbols hit, a x5 multiplier is applied to all money symbols, but the other multipliers will not be applied.
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Going West often signifies one of two things. Either a developer has fallen for the romance of the Wild West and wants to contribute something of themselves to the illustrious genre, or they've just plum run out of ideas. Bounty Gold feels like the second scenario applies as it really hasn't stretched Pragmatic Play's design capabilities. It looks average, plays average, and any theme could have been used to colour the action, activity, or whatever you want to call the gameplay. The Wild West is one of the most popular go-to's in slot development. Like a favourite hoodie, it pretty much goes with anything, it's reassuringly comforting, yet it can also come across as a beat-up, baggy, safe option.
The West remains a strong crowd-pleaser, and if a studio has got something special to offer, by all means, bring it on, but Bounty Gold is not one of those slots. The base game is a literal placeholder to slap players around a bit until free spins trigger, which happened at a surprisingly low frequency. Once you're in, the bonus game is a basic streak respin feature, just one played out on up to four matrices, Eye of Horus Power 4 Slots style. There are no special symbols, yet admittedly, the jackpots are something, as are multipliers if you can unlock them. During the review, opening 2 matrices was pretty much a given; getting to three or the mythical four-level will require a healthy dose of luck. More than what we were allotted, sad to say, pardner. However, if luck is running hot, players can collect payouts up to a win cap of 5,000x the bet. This amount is instantly awarded when filling the fourth bonus matrix; hard to see it happening otherwise.
If you've played every other Western-themed slot or streak respin powered game out there and are hankering for an acceptable, though far from great, fix, Bounty Gold might be alright for wiling away some time before something better comes along. That probably won't take too long since Bounty Gold is a pretty bland slot all told and far from Pragmatic Play's best work.
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