Urban Neon

Urban Neon

by Platipus

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Spin Your Way to the City Lights with the Urban Neon Slot!

As the night falls and the old city sparks up with neon lights, stop for a bit in the dark alley and finish your night out with a chance to win big! Spin the neon reels and fill the alley with the sounds and sights of neon fruit symbols as they drop to your reels! Perhaps you’ll trigger the bonus feature and get a choice between Stacked, Expanding and Sticky Wilds!

Urban Neon is a February 2024 release by Platipus Gaming, and it’s a classic fruit machine that uses neon symbols in a paytable that can get you up to 50x win on a single payline, or 1,000x on all 20 paylines. The game uses a standard 5×3 board, with 20 fixed paylines.

Read this thorough review to find out all the facts about this game, including how to play it and what’s the best way to approach this game to squeeze out a big win. Or refer to the demo game below to play it for free. When you’re ready to play, visit one of the Platipus casinos below that have the game, and play for real money!

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Mathematics & Facts

This a five-reel game with 20 fixed paylines, played on a 5×3 board. It has 13 symbols which include 6 high-win symbols, 5 low-win symbols, a Scatter and a Wild.

Theoretical return to player (RTP) is 95.00% for the entire game, with 70.27% of the return coming from the base game and 24.73%, or almost a quarter, coming from the free spins feature. If you buy the feature then the RTP of that is 95.34%.

The hit frequency in the main game is 17.32% or roughly one in six spins. That means you can expect to get a winning spin once every six spins, but it might as well be a near win, which is a win smaller than your bet size.

The chance to trigger the bonus feature is listed as 0.63%, which would suggest you’ll trigger it once every 158 spins on average. The price to Buy the feature is 41x your bet per spin.

Volatility is listed as Low/Medium by the developer. We’re not so sure, this is a tight game.

The largest possible win in the game, on any given spin, is 1,000x your bet per spin. The largest single payline win is 50x your bet. Maximum wins in the base game and in the bonus round are identical.

The game was released on 8 February 2024. It is available in 100+ currencies and in the following languages: EN, DA, RU, ES, IT, ZH-CN, DE, TR, JA, TH, ID, VI, SV, PT, FR, ZH-TW, KO, RO, UA, HR, NL.

Bonus Features

Urban Neon is all about the free spins feature, but you have a choice to make, and will likely need a bit of experience with the game – possibly through demo play – to see which of the three options works best for your playing style.

This is the only bonus feature of the game, the free spins bonus round with three options regarding how Wilds behave during the feature. You also have an option to Buy the feature, which is quite popular these days as many slots include this option, to cater to the players who don’t wish to wait.

Free Spins

When you land three Bonus scatter symbols on reels 2, 3 and 4, the free spins feature will be triggered. When you trigger the free spins bonus round, you’ll be given a choice between three different options – so choose wisely!

15 Free Spins with Stacked Symbols – This would be the low variance option. You get the largest number of free spins, and the added feature is that Wilds only appear in stacks. Note that Wilds only appear on reels 2 through 5 in this game.

10 Free Spins with Expanding Wilds – Choose this feature if you want the middle ground and if you want to benefit from Expanding Wilds, if any appear during your session. This will make an individual win larger because the Wild will expand to fill the reel.

5 Free Spins with Sticky Wilds – The ultimate choice for a high variance player, the 5 free spins with Sticky Wilds will have you on the edge of your seat as you wait for more Wilds to accumulate on your board. The fifth spin could be a mega win if you get enough Wilds in the previous four!

The best thing that can happen during the bonus round is, of course, having enough Wilds on a given spin to produce a huge win that involves one of the high-win symbols on the first reel. You can get there in three different ways, and it seems that Sticky Wilds are the safest route to this, with Expanding Wilds also able to get you there but on a spin to spin basis. It’s good to have the Wilds accumulate with the Sticky Wilds feature.

Buy Feature

If you don’t want to wait for those three Bonus symbols, you can buy the free spins feature instantly and can do so as often as you want. You might as well play the game exclusively by buying the free spins feature.

The theoretical return to player (RTP) is 95.34% for buying the feature, which is slightly above the game’s usual RTP of 95.00%, so it isn’t a losing proposition, quite the contrary. Especially if you already have good experiences with one of the three available options. For example, you might want to push your luck with the Sticky Wilds and you may want to Buy it over and over again.

It is worth buying the feature in Urban Neon?

With the low win frequency on any spin, the free spins round feels very tight as well. Of the three difficult choices none seems right, and you’ll need a lot of luck just to break even. It’s best to treat the free spins bonus round in Urban Neon as just an additional way to make some money when you’re lucky with the Scatters.

Base Game & How to Play

Explain the base game, layout of the reels, and basically how does the base game play out, what is the hit rate (if known), can you expect to see a lot of small wins frequently or is the game tight and there will be a lot of non-winning spins. Is this a game that pays wins smaller than your bet per spin, or a game that doesn’t do that?

What is the minimum and maximum bet, and what are the bet levels? Is there autoplay and how does it look like?

Theme

The neon theme in a dark alley in some large city is the best thing about this game. You’ll have a blast spining these neon reels in that dark alley background, and the contrast is simply amazing. The sounds add to the ambience, making for an incredible slot playing experience.

Pays and Symbols

Other than the Wild and the Bonus Scatter, the game features 11 symbols, for a total of 13 in the game. We could say that six of the symbols are high-win symbols while five are considered low-win.

Divide the coin wins in the paytable below by 20 to get the actual win per spin. For example, if your total bet is $1 per spin and you get three Lemons, that’s 10 coins divided by 20 paylines. That’s 0.5 times $1 = $0.50.

To get a full board win amount, simply use the first number. For example, a full board of Double Seven symbols is worth 1,000x your total bet per spin. Or, if you had a $1 bet, you’d win $1,000.

Symbol

Five

Four

Three

Double Seven

1000 coins (50x)

600 coins (30x)

80 coins (4x)

Seven

900

500

70

Double Bar

800

450

60

Bar

750

350

40

Bell

500

200

25

Horseshoe

400

100

15

Lemon

200

60

10

Plum

200

60

10

Cherry

150

50

7

Grape

150

50

7

Strawberry

150

50

7

 

This is an interesting paytable that has wins for five- and four-of-a-kind almost identical to one another, with a steep drop for the three-of-a-kind wins that serve no purpose other than to keep you going for a bit longer. Whenever you get at least four of the high-win symbols you’ll win a significant amount. Anything below that, including a four-of-a-kind win of a low-win symbol, and you get peanuts.

Similar Games

How does Urban Neon stack up against similar games – the classic fruit machines with the neon theme?

There are plenty of quality titles in this niche, for example Neon Staxx by NetEnt, Laser Fruit by Red Tiger Gaming, Neon Fruits by Kajot, and many more. It feels as if most of those games have something unique that sets them apart and gives you a reason to play it. Unfortunately, in Urban Neon there are zero reasons to choose this slot game over a similar title.

Conclusion – Why play Urban Neon?

Urban Neon is filling a specific niche, it’s a classic fruit machine with neon symbols, and it does it well. The theme is spectacular yet simple, and all players who love these symbols will love them even more in this game. However, the game feels tight and doesn’t offer much in the bonus round – there certainly isn’t a mega win hidden behind that feature as we know for a fact the largest possible win in the game is 1,000x your bet. This isn’t enough to tolerate and endure the low win frequency and the many near-win outcomes.

If you want to give it a go because of the theme, feel free to do so, just be aware that this game has intriguing mathematics that may not be what you intiuitively expect. For example, Buy Feature isn’t worth it at all, neither is the free spins bonus round in many cases, and you might be better off simply waiting for a large win in the base game.

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Platipus

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