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Review: Big City 5’s Deluxe – A Nostalgic Grind That Doesn’t Really Pay Off
If you’ve ever walked the floor of a brick-and-mortar casino, you know exactly what Big City 5’s Deluxe feels like. IGT basically took an old-school, polished slot cabinet and shoved it straight into your web browser.
Don’t expect any modern bells and whistles here. There are no cascading reels, no multipliers, and no “buy the bonus” buttons. It’s just a standard 5×3 grid with 20 fixed paylines. Oh, and a giant ladder of ten progressive jackpots sitting on the side of the screen, constantly teasing you.
The Paytable Grind
Here’s the weird part about this game: the payouts are completely lopsided. The low-paying card symbols give you absolute peanuts (5x to 12.5x for a full line), and then the premium suit symbols suddenly jump up to massive payouts between 100x and 375x.
The catch? Most of the time, landing three of a kind doesn’t even cover your bet.
But the game actually relies on you getting these tiny, annoying wins. Every time you land 3 or 4 of a kind, a tiny sliver of your bet gets tossed into that specific symbol’s jackpot on the ladder. You only win the actual pot if you hit 5 of a kind. Honestly, it’s a grind. You can watch a premium Diamond pot creep up from 168x to 170x over an agonizingly long stretch without anyone ever hitting it.
Wilds make things even more confusing. In the base game, using a wild to finish a line pays a normal win and feeds the pot. But in the free spins, that same combo wins the pot outright. Then there are the “Any Red” or “Any Black” wins. If you mix suits of the same color, you get a measly quarter of your stake back, and it contributes absolutely nothing to the jackpots. Thanks, I guess?
Bait and Switch Bonuses
Getting to the main bonus takes some work. You need to land consecutive “Red Five” symbols starting from the first reel to trigger 15, 20, or 25 free spins. If you’re lucky enough to land a “Gold Five” on the middle reel, you get to play the Wheel Bonus first.
The Wheel Bonus sounds awesome – it’s five wheels in a row, and you want to land on “extra spin” wedges to move to the next wheel where the bigger pots are. Reaching the fifth wheel gives you a shot at a guaranteed 375x payout. But realistically? It’s a total gauntlet. Most of the time, you’re going to hit a “START” wedge almost immediately, which abruptly kicks you out of the wheel and into your regular free spins.
The Ultimate Trap: Don’t Change Your Bet!
Once the free spins start, things can get wild. Because Wilds now award jackpots instead of feeding them, the round turns into a high-stakes lottery. You might sit through a bunch of completely dead spins, only to suddenly hit a Spade pot for 125x your bet. It’s incredibly feast or famine.
But here is the absolute dealbreaker of the whole game: the pots are tied to your exact bet size.
If you get bored and decide to raise or lower your bet, the entire jackpot ladder resets to a different set of numbers. That means you aren’t chasing the pot you just spent half an hour building up; you’re suddenly playing on a ladder funded by random strangers who played at that new bet size before you.
Final Verdict
At the end of the day, Big City 5’s Deluxe is a really tough sell. The max win isn’t even a multiplier; it’s capped at strict cash amounts. Plus, IGT claims a 94.92% RTP (Return to Player), which is already pretty bad, but casinos can actually hide the real number and make it even worse.
For comparison, you can play something like Wincent Wolf by BGaming – which has a similar feel – but offers a 97% RTP and a massive 10,000x win cap.
Big City 5’s Deluxe asks you to accept a hidden return rate, a terrible paytable, and long losing streaks just to fund a jackpot that someone else will probably win. Unless you are incredibly nostalgic for old casino cabinets, skip this one.
