Parx Casino Review

Throughout the United States, gambling expansion has been occurring at a breakneck pace in recent years, with few people today being more than a few hours away from at least one casino. But perhaps no state has been more successful in their efforts than Pennsylvania, which has quickly grown to become the second largest gaming market in the country (trailing only Nevada, naturally).

One of the major successes within that state has been Parx Casino and Racing, the largest casino gaming complex in all of Pennsylvania. Located in Bensalem in Bucks County, the casino features 3,500 slots along with a large poker room, plenty of table games, amenities, and live horse racing.

But the brand’s outreach has gone well beyond their land-based operations. The owners have been prepared for the possibility of real money online gambling in their state, and have already launched a play money site that shows off a huge number of games in a free-to-play format. It’s a social casino that’s very much in the vein of similar sites you may have seen on Facebook or across the Internet, featuring plenty of slots and lots of other games that can be played at no charge, but also offer no real prizes.

Lots of Games, Once You Unlock Them

Parx Casino is run through the Play4Fun Network, a series of free-to-play gambling sites that are heavily slots focused and draw upon the same pool of games. These titles are drawn from providers like WMS and Bally Technologies, which means that you’ll get to play authentic versions of some of the more popular titles that have been enjoyed around the world in live casinos.

When you first sign up for an account here, you’ll be automatically granted 50,000 credits. These are the units you’ll use to play games and participate in tournaments on the site, but they don’t represent any particularly amount of cash: you can neither wager nor win real money on this site.

Most of your time here will likely be spent playing the nearly 75 slot machines that are offered to players. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to play all of these options from the moment you sign up. Instead, as in many social sites, you’ll have to work towards unlocking each one, leveling up your account and unlocking new games at specific times.

At first, for instance, only the Jungle Wild machine is open to players. However, once you place 25,000 credits worth of bets (regardless of how much you actually win or lose), you’ll move up to Level 2, at which point you can play Reel Rich Devil. Get all the way to Level 5, and Brazilian Beauty is opened up.

This process continues all the way up to Level 900(!), when you’ll unlock what is currently the final game on the site, Cirque du Masquerade. In between, you’ll unlock a whole lot of entertaining and often familiar titles, many of which feature famous franchises and others that will be old favorites for anyone who has played slots at land-based resorts. Some of the games (and the levels needed to unlock them) include:

• OMG! Puppies (Level 17)
• Monopoly Party Train (51)
• OMG! Kittens (145)
• Zeus III (185)
• Lady Godiva (225)
• Cash Spin (245)
• Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville (375)
• Dean Martin’s Pool Party (450)
• Kiss (500)
• Titanic (600)

In addition, there are a small number of video poker titles that are available right from the moment you first open your account. There are nine different machines you can choose from, including:

• Jacks or Better
• Deuces Wild
• Bonus Poker
• Double Bonus Poker
• Double Double Bonus
• Triple Bonus
• Triple Triple Bonus
• Double Joker Poker
• Joker’s Wild

Plenty of Ways to Get Credits – With or Without Paying

Like almost every social casino on the market today, Parx Casino does give you the option of spending a little money if you’re interested in doing so. For the most part, in this case, that means transactions where you may spend money in order to add credits to your account balance.

The cost of these purchases varies depending on how much you want to buy, with bigger spenders getting slightly better deals. Parx advertises the following basic packages:

• 500,000 Credits: $4.99
• 1.25 Million: $9.99
• 4.375 Million: $24.99
• 30 Million: $99.99
• 100 Million: $249.99

You can also spend money in order to unlock some of the slot machines in the collection for a limited amount of time. For instance, say that as a dog person, you really want to play OMG! Puppies today. You may spend $1.99 to unlock the title for six hours. You can also do this with 50 million credits, giving you a way to spend your virtual currency if your balance becomes especially high. The exact cost can differ for various machines: we’ve seen some that cost $2.99 or $4.99, and others that will unlock for a full day for 75 million credits.

This means that there are plenty of options for those who want to speed up the rate at which they can open up the entire casino. However, we’ve found that there’s really no reason why most average players will feel like they’d have to spend anything in order to enjoy themselves here. For starters, we can’t say for sure whether we’ve just been lucky or this is intentional, but it sure seems as though the return on these machines is quite high – either slightly positive for the player, or at least very close to 100% RTP. We’ve certainly had our share of losing streaks, but in a few hours of play, we were up significantly just in terms of our play.

And that doesn’t count all of the other ways in which we were able to accumulate credits. The small bonuses for leveling up and the additional coins that are given out every few hours helped, but the biggest and easiest way to boost your balance is through the regular tournaments that are constantly running on the site. Each of these events simply tracks how much you win on all of your spins during that time period (each tournament runs for about 10 minutes). At the end of that period, the three players at the top of the leaderboard each collect a share of the prize pool, which typically is worth several millions. Particularly in off-peak hours, there may only be a handful of people playing at any given time, making it easy to place in the top three and suddenly increase your balance by millions.

Fun and Easy, But Time Consuming for Completionists

Like most of the Play4Fun Network sites, Parx Casino is a lot of fun to play at, and gives you plenty of value at no cost – even if luck doesn’t go your way, it’s hard to imagine you’ll run out of credits given all the available bankroll boosts and bonuses. The game selection is also a big plus, as these are real slot machines created by quality developers, not quick cash ins that you’ll lose interest in after a few spins.

The only down side is that it will take you a very long time to unlock all of the slots. If you like completing these kinds of sites – the closest you can get to “beating the game,” so to speak – then prepare to spend a whole lot of hours and days grinding away. For a while, you’re going to be limited to just a handful of options, and it takes a long time to open some of the highest level machines. But other than that caveat, we can say that most players will have a great time here, with no obligation to spend a penny unless you feel the need to play for higher (pretend) stakes.