It’s always a curious thing to find out that an online casino software provider doesn’t have much of a presence on the Internet. This can easily lead to suspicions over the actual professionalism or motives of a company that doesn’t have a functional website, for instance, but there are a surprising number of smaller firms that are entirely legitimate, have plenty of experience, and just don’t seem to put much work into advertising or building a site that operators and players can visit.
One example of the latter is Noble Gaming, a London-based developer that has been in business since 2007. Technically, this company does have a working website, but at the time of this writing, it only consisted of a single page featuring a holiday message presented in an animated gif – not the most helpful information for a prospective player or client to see.
However, that doesn’t mean that this isn’t a successful group. In their decade in the business, they’ve managed to expand throughout the world, adding offices in locations such as Prague and Sofia, and build a portfolio of more than 150 titles. While this may not be a group that’s easy to find detailed information about, there have managed to do a lot of work with some notable partners over the years, becoming relatively prolific across the online gambling centers such as Canada, Australia and beyond. even as they’ve largely managed to stay under the radar.
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As much as we would like to take about the entire Noble Gaming collection, it can be hard to track down these games, as available information on the firm is quite limited. As we said at the top, the company is said to have a library of 150 or more games in total.
However, we’ve only had the opportunity to test out a more limited selection of the provider’s slot machines, which are available at some major casino sites on the Internet. However, even this smaller look into the games we’ve been able to try has been relatively illuminating. The company has made a variety of titles that offer up a few different gameplay styles, from some classics that are simple and reminiscent of the older style of games that once populated land-based resorts to some more innovative and creative designs that may offer a change of pace even for veteran gamblers.
The presentation of these slots tends to be very simple, though it is clear that a decent amount of work has been put into the art. The backdrops tend to look appropriate for the themes and offer up a lot of subtle detail; on the other hand, the symbols tend to be just about average, with few animations and nothing particularly outstanding that jumps out to catch the eye. The sound work is pretty run-of-the-mill as well, with some generic music playing at the start of most games. We also weren’t entirely impressed by the interface on which these slots run: the look is rather old and blocky, and we didn’t like having to click multiple times to quickly collect our winnings after a spin.
Let’s start by looking at one of the more popular titles in this library, Burning Joker. This is a five-reel, five-line machine that features one of the oldest themes in the industry: fruits and bells. Players are tasked with matching lemons, cherries, watermelons, bells, and sevens across the reels, with longer matches earning you bigger rewards. Graphically, this is a rather slick looking game: sure, there’s nothing special here given the theme, but all of the symbols carry a bright, colorful, and shiny look, which makes for an attractive presentation.
While this game may be light on the special features, there are a couple interesting symbols to work out for. For instance, the titular joker is an expanding wild that fills the entire reel it appears on. There are also a couple of different scatters that can serve to earn additional prizes on each spin. Like almost all Noble Gaming titles, this machine also includes a gamble feature. Players can choose to risk their winnings in order to take a shot at bigger rewards. Simply predict the color of a randomly drawn card from a deck and you’ll double your prize; correctly guess the suit, and you can instead win 4x the initial earnings.
For something that’s a bit more like a modern video slot, you might want to look at the Her Majesty’s Knights online slot. This 20-line machine features an entirely cartoonish art style that, while obviously looking a bit childish, really makes this game stand out from the pack. It’s colorful and goofy, with a Sunday newspaper comics style that we’ve rarely seen anywhere else in the industry.
As for the gameplay elements, you’ll be matching a lot of different knights, with names like Edward, Liam, Arin and Cedric. Each of these brave soldiers is large enough to cover an entire reel, meaning basically every icon on the screen is stacked. This offers up the potential to win on every line at once, even when the wild queen doesn’t appear on the screen. Meanwhile, hitting three castle symbols will earn you free spins that continue until you score a win, guaranteed.
Several other titles take the basic framework of Burning Joker, but making slight changes to mix up the gameplay elements just a bit. For instance, there is Dynamite Wild, a machine that uses the same fruits theme but adds in substitutes that explode to turn all adjacent symbols wild as well. Another example is Break the Lines, which again keeps the theme in place but features mystery scatters and a bonus symbol that can turn every icon into a scatter for that spin.
These are a just a few of the many titles created by Noble Gaming, but we feel they are pretty representative of what we’ve seen from the company. As we noted, we haven’t tried the entire collection, but some of the other slots we’ve seen from them include:
One of the things we usually find when a company doesn’t do a lot of work at building an online presence is that they also aren’t exactly frequent guests at the major conferences in the gaming industry. But that hasn’t been the case for Noble, which has actually done a pretty good job of showing off their wares at industry trade shows. For instance, the company has showed up at the International Casino Expo Today Gaming show, displaying their technologies including video lottery terminals, remote gaming servers, and multi-game cabinets that can be found in land-based casinos.
In terms of what players might enjoy seeing on the Internet, the company has also made a point of making games that are available not only on desktop computers, but also on mobile phones and tablets. Operators have appreciated the group’s commitment to easy integration, which has led to their slots appearing side-by-side with those from countless other developers. To take a couple of examples, you can play Noble Gaming titles alongside Spielo slots, or Spadegaming slots, making them a common inclusion on sites that try to combine dozens of providers into one large games platform.
Noble Gaming is a company that we wished we knew a little bit more about. The lack of information about them isn’t as concerning as it is in some other cases, considering that they participate in plenty of industry events, which has given them the kind of presence that makes them a serious and substantial developer. Still, not being able to find out more about them makes it difficult to be sure just how we should feel about their underlying software: for instance, it means it is difficult to know how tight or loose they tend to make their games, who tests and verifies the fairness of their machines, and so on.
In addition, while there’s nothing really wrong with the slots we’ve played, they’re not particularly interesting, either. These are solid offerings that can provide plenty of fun for gamblers who are just looking for generic slots. On the other hand, those who are used to playing the wide range of titles out on the market today won’t see anything new here, nor much innovation that might give them a unique style. Certainly, they aren’t among the top slots developers operating today, but you can still find them at some of our favorite sites, including a selection of online casinos with no deposit welcome bonus deals.
All of that is to say that most players probably don’t have to go out of their way to find Noble Gaming sites. If you happen across their games, though, they’re worth a look – especially if you like machines that aren’t too complicated and use a classic gameplay format.
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