Play Golden Mane for Free

Golden Mane is going to take you to a beautiful location, with an entire landscape as a backdrop. The mountains, green hills and sunrise that serve as a background for the reels and command buttons are simply gorgeous to look at, like a giant postcard. It isn’t hard to imagine oneself galloping away across such a beautiful scenery.

Context is everything in modern slot games, and the NextGen team is giving players all they could be asking for in that regard. Golden Mane has a strong look and we were immediately drawn to the game once it had finished loading. Looks are important, but we also have to dig deeper than that and check out the gameplay - which we will do in our next section.

Despite its grandiose surroundings, Golden Mane is sticking to a small setup with 5 reels and only 10 paylines. The betting range starts at 0.15 and goes up to 150 credits per spin nonetheless, enough to satisfy most players out there. The different pop-up menus on the screen allow you to choose a wager freely and to activate the autospin mode whenever needed, to be able to play with the same wager times and times again on the reels.

With a 96.96% RTP, Golden Mane is theoretically more generous than your average slot game. The medium volatility makes it also very balanced, allowing small and big wins to occur at virtually any time. In our experience, Golden Mane was pleasant to play but not exactly exceptional when sticking to the base game. The most common reel symbols are card icons, trees, mountains, a black and a white horse worth at most 700 times your current wager.

You can find two different special symbols on the reels of Golden Mane, which we found moderately helpful overall. The golden horse is the first one of them, and it plays the role of the wild card to replace the other icons on the reels. What you really want to try and reach is a combination of 5 wilds, which unlocks a jackpot of x1500 instantly.

The horseshoe symbols are scatters and can pay up to 6 free spins wherever they appear during the game. Not that the Scatter Run symbol is a random bonus that can occur at any time and adds extra scatters all over the reels at once. The wilds are still active during the free games, but can only replace specific symbols, one at a time.

If you enjoyed Golden Mane, you should probably check out Chinese Dragon from Merkur or even The Book by Stake Logic. Both of which are based on a similar reel set and can prove a little more challenging as well. You won’t find any horses in any of these two other games, but the stakes can be quite high there as well if you are willing to risk a few extra credits.

The real appeal of Golden Mane, for us at least, lies in the graphics and the general ambiance of the game, for which it can be tough to find an exact equivalent on the slot game market. This might seem like a detail but we really enjoyed the feeling of freedom that the game gives off, and the easy rules will also help beginners get started right away.

Golden Mane is a dynamic slot game with a high RTP, which is already a good start compared to many other games. We did think, however, that the small reel set was a bit of a shame. A game starring galloping horse should really offer an ocean of winning possibilities to players, and this is not exactly what we experienced while testing Golden Mane.

In other words, Golden Mane felt like a bit of a missed opportunity overall. The game is still great to look at and mostly fun to play, but it could have been so much more. The theme and graphics made it look very promising, but we still felt little let down in the end.