San Quentin xWays Slot Review

23/01/2021 | Categories: Nolimit City Slots | Published by: Joe | Last updated: 05/01/2024

If you are a frequent visitor of our site, you know where we stand on Nolimit City slots. The Stockholm-based developer has had a heck of a year. Games such as Book of Shadows and Warrior Graveyard have wowed those in the iGaming industry, and the company seems on course to continue its hot streak in 2021. Thus, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to review their latest release, San Quentin xWays. It hit online casinos on January 12 2020, and it took players a week to become aware of this prison-themed reel-spinner, despite Nolimit City dropping teasers weeks prior.

Theme & Design

If you’ve watched any American movies or listened to any aggressive music, then you likely know all about San Quentin State Prison. It is the most notorious and largest prison in North America and the oldest one in California. Inmates call it – The Arena. It has been made famous in pop culture thanks to Johnny Cash, the documentary series Lockup, and the Metallica music video, St. Anger. In all honesty, glorifying prison life may not be the best theme for an online slot, but to each his own.

San Quentin xWays has a very mid-1990s arcade feel. Its visual look reminded us of Capcom’s Final Fight series. Naturally, the graphics here are far better than what was available on 16-bit systems such as the SNES. They even mimic cel-shading and boast some cool animations.

Two poles with CCTV cameras flank the reel grid, whose reels spin in front of the outer prison wall. Once you enter the bonus round, the sky darkens, and the camera pans down to the complex’s entrance. A basketball hoop is to your right, and silhouettes of fist-pumping maniacs appear in the foreground. These look like old gif-like models that early-2000s WWE games used to fill arena bleachers.

You can find the spin button to the right of your screen. It’s by far the biggest one in the game, and below it is your auto-spin one and account balance. You can mute the heavy metal soundtrack, adjust your bet size, and enter the settings page via the buttons on your left.

Specs & Gameplay

By default, this is a five-reel, three-row slot, which expands to feature a 5×5 configuration. It utilizes the 243 ways to win format and wins happen when you land three to five matching symbols on adjacent reels, left to right. The standard RTP here is 96.03%, but with the max Bonus Buy option, it will jump to 96.95%. Beware, some operators offer this game with an RTP of 94.11%. As expected, this is a high variance slot that has a surprisingly high hit rate of around one in three spins. Bet sizes range from $0.2 to $32, and the max win potential is a whopping x150,000 your bet.

The low-paying symbols are a bar of soap, a lighter, a toilet paper roll, handcuffs, and two shanks. If you hit five identical symbols from this batch, you’ll win either an x1.5 or x2 win. The high-paying symbols are the five inmates, and for five of a kind, they will pay out a prize that ranges from x2.5 to x5 your wager.

The police batch is the Wild, replacing all other symbols, and the prison tower is this game’s Scatter. There are also what this slot calls Enhancer Cells, which are extra rows at the top and bottom of the grid that house exclusive symbols, xWays, and Razor Splits.

Bonus Features

At the core of San Quentin xWays’ base game are the Enhancer Cells and the Split Wilds features. As mentioned, the extra top and bottom rows are Enhancer Cell positions. These become available once one or two Scatters land on the reels. When they do, the activating Scatters morph into Wilds. The new grid configuration gives you more ways to win, and it opens up the Razor Splits and the xWay symbols. If you manage to land a Razor Split inside a cell position, it will cut all regular symbols on that reel in two. If you manage to land a Razor Split symbol inside both cells on a reel, these will cut all regular ones twice. Hitting an xWay in an Enhancer Cell will stack a randomly chosen pay symbol 1×4 high.

If you manage to land three or more Scatters, you enter the Lockdown Spins bonus round. Now, the number of free spins gets decided in a mini-round where numbers between one and three show up in the Enhancer Cells. They get tallied up to a maximum of thirty. Before this happens, the game conducts a spin where it chooses an inmate multiplier. Depending on the number of Scatters you landed to enter this round, you get one, two, or three Jumping Wilds. What do these do? Well, they replace regular pay symbols and move into random positions on each spin. Plus, they may get a multiplier attached to them. Hitting a Jumping Wild and a Razor Split on the same reel will double that Wild’s multiplier.

If you cannot wait to enter the Lockdown Spins via the regular gameplay, you can buy your way in via the Bonus Buy option. It will cost you x100, x400, and x2,000 your bet, depending on the number of Scatters you want to utilize in the bonus round.

GOSU Verdict

In all honesty, at first sight, we didn’t expect that this slot would deliver the goods. However, the base game was fun, as it featured a decent amount of wins that kept us interested. The symbol value was low, so these wins didn’t amount to much, but at least they came with some regularity. The features in the Lockdown Spins are pretty cool, but the variance is super-high. To have a shot of coming close to the game’s max exposure of x150,000, you must have five Scatters in play. Your odds of landing any sizeable wins on this title are slim, but it’s a nice change of pace with some innovative features.