Santa Surprise

Released for Christmas 2011, Santa Surprise is a 20 line Playtech video slot with two bonus features, a gamble option and a festive theme. The game has 200 coin maximum bet and coin sizes range from between 0.01 and 5.00 so you can bet betting max for as little as 0.20 or as much as a big 1,000.00 per spin.

The Santa symbol is wild and substitutes for everything but the scattered House symbols and the bonus Tree symbols. Getting five Santa symbols on any active line awards the top line win of 10,000 coins or 100,000 coins if you are playing 10 coins per line. The Santa symbols also make up the second highest line win with 2,000 coins for four.

After the top two line wins there is a quite a drop to the next highest pay with five Bells coming in at 500 coins. From there you have a 400 coin pay for five Stockings and then a 200 coin pay for five of the gifts. The games lower line wins are made up with the A, K, Q, J and 10 symbols with five of a kinds coming in at between 150 and 50 coins.

The scattered House symbols are the key to the free spins. Getting three or more anywhere on the screen awards 10 free spins with all wins tripled. As usual there is a nice pay for five scatters which in this case is 500X your bet or 100,000 coins at max bet. The free spin can be re-triggered and the second Gift Bonus can be won during the feature.

To win the Gift Bonus you need to get three, four or five of the Bonus Tree symbols on any active line aligned left to right. Once triggered you get three, four or five picks on the bonus stage based on the amount of triggering symbols (Preview). The wins on the Gift Bonus can be quite small with some gifts awarding less than your total bet. We would have liked to see the possibility of hitting some big wins on the bonus but this is not the case.

As well as the two bonus features, Santa Surprise also has a red or black gamble options which you can use to try to increase your wins. You can keep doubling up until you either reach the gamble limit which varies from casino to casino, collect or lose.

In the end Santa Surprise is a fairly standard free spin video slot with a pick a box bonus. It doesn't offer anything really new and the fact that you can't really win much in terms of bet to pay on the bonus is a bit of a negative. In our opinion this is one of those games that will only really be popular during December if you're feeling festive.