Inside America’s Casinos: Stop #10 – Ocean Casino Resort Atlantic City – CDC Gaming

Join CDC Gaming as we embark upon a road trip Inside America’s Casinos. For our 10th stop, we visit Ocean Casino Resort.
Atlantic City, it’s been a while.
After wrapping up my visit to Harrah’s, it was time to leave the Marina District and go back in time to visit the Atlantic City Boardwalk I’d missed so much. As I expected, returning to the Boardwalk felt like going back to the Atlantic City I’d known and loved in my younger days.
Don’t get me wrong, it does look different than what I remembered from my wild college weekends, but it was still a version of Atlantic City that’s a lot closer to what I remembered and to what most people would imagine it to be.
Similar to the Trump casinos in Atlantic City, Ocean Casino Resort has had its fair share of property rollercoaster rides. The structure, which is the northmost casino property on the oceanfront, sits at 500 Boardwalk.
It opened in 2012 as Revel Casino Hotel at an investment of about $2.4 billion. A smoke-free luxury casino, the high-end design didn’t play well with Atlantic City’s core gambling market. Weak revenue and mounting debt forced the owners to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy twice, in 2013 and 2014, and Revel closed two years after opening.
The property sat vacant for a few years until it eventually reopened in 2018 as Ocean Resort Casino. It was definitely ahead of its time back then and it still looks futuristic now. So I was excited to check it out and see how this very atypical property blended with its surroundings and Atlantic City Boardwalk crowds.
I didn’t have to search for the property. In fact, it found me as I was driving down Delaware Avenue to the north end of the Boardwalk. Towering at about 710 feet, the property is one of the tallest in the Garden State. But it’s not just a tall building, it’s curved, covered in blue glass, and has a dramatic rooftop. It reminded me more of New York City’s monumental office high rises than a Boardwalk casino.
While many Atlantic City casinos show you their evolution and age through visible layers of renovation and expansion, Ocean Casino Resort feels like a structure that just landed on the Boardwalk overnight. It looks cleaner and newer and it dominates the surroundings even from a distance.
More like an office building than a casino, Ocean nonetheless is connected to the ocean as much as the Boardwalk. (Shutterstock)
Once I got closer and my eyes got used to the sun glaring from the building’s blue glass, I started noticing the surroundings. The property is fully connected to the Boardwalk and coastline. As I drove closer to the tower, which was blocking the sun, the narrow street led me to a parking entrance that was anticlimactic to everything I’ve seen so far. It felt like a back service entrance to an office building.
There are five other hotels on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, but none of them use their proximity to the water like Ocean does. Unlike Hard Rock, Bally’s, and Caesars, which have back exits to the Boardwalk, this property maximizes its location and proximity to the Atlantic.
When I walked in, I immediately noticed the difference from older Boardwalk casinos. The neighboring properties I visited all seem to follow traditional casino-design patterns, intentionally facing inward to artificial-lit large spaces and featuring a gaming floor with low ceilings, controlled lighting, and limited awareness of time and the outside surroundings. But here, the ocean is visible all the time through huge windows, open sightlines, and curves of spaces designed to make you see and feel the Atlantic.
I was surprised by how much sunlight came into the casino, sometimes even making it difficult to see the screens of slot machines next to the windows. But it was a price I thought was worth paying for the overall feeling of brightness and openness. The architecture also corresponds with the ocean theme, featuring cleaner lines, more open layouts, less visual clutter, and again, a lot of use of the outside world as opposed to heavy-handed attempts to block it.
Ocean Casino Resort uses an elegant and modern design with open, curved spaces. (Ziv Chen photo for CDC Gaming)
Although Ocean Casino Resort lists the casino first in its name, I didn’t feel like it reflected the property’s priorities. Ocean seems to lean heavily into the broader resort experience. I felt that, in addition to gamblers, it’s designed to draw guests who want to spend time away from the casino floor.
The property has 1,900 hotel rooms, 18+ restaurants, 7+ bars, a spa, a large convention space, and live entertainment venues (hosting concerts, boxing, MMA, etc.). There are also nightclubs, a beach club, and even a golf swing site. Walking around the different areas feels like this resort is aiming at a higher mix of non-gaming spend per visitor.
The Fanatics sportsbook at Ocean Casino resort. (Ziv Chen photo for CDC Gaming)
As mentioned, the Atlantic Ocean is always present in the Ocean property and that’s no different when it comes to the gaming floor. Spanning roughly 135,000 square feet, it’s smaller than some regional mega-gaming complexes I visited earlier in the trip. Yet the space is neatly organized and never feels too busy. A lot of it has to do with the gaming floor following the overall design guidelines, featuring high ceilings, large windows, and glass walls that allow for plenty of natural light.
The gaming floor at Ocean feels luxurious throughout, but I was especially impressed by the high-limit gaming options. The Cove spans 7,450 square feet and features ocean views, 140 high-limit slots, and a dedicated cashier and bar. There’s also The Loft and a high-limit table game area.
Coming from Harrah’s, the difference in demographics stood out as soon as I set foot in Ocean Casino and Resort. Probably, if I’d come straight from Borgata, I wouldn’t have noticed such a huge difference. But thinking back to Harrah’s, which caters more to crowds of typical Atlantic City Boardwalk casinos, I felt the guests here were more resort-oriented than gambling-focused, a lot more fashion-conscious, and most of the people I spoke to were resort guests and not people from the outside who came into the casino especially to gamble.
There were still many active players on the gaming floor, but I noticed they were in a smaller proportion to the many guests moving between restaurants, lounges, bars, and going to and from the Boardwalk.
As I walked out to the Boardwalk and looked up at Ocean Casino Resort for one last time, I stood there thinking about how different it felt from Atlantic City’s older casino model that I remember from many years ago — a facility built mainly around gaming volumes.
Ocean stands out from the crowd not only for its unique and modern design, but also for its appeal to a different type of casino guest: people who tend to come for high-quality gaming, but at the same time expect nightlife, dining, wellness, and a connection to the destination around them.
It’s not that the casino floor doesn’t matter anymore, but at Ocean, gambling is part of the overall experience, not the focal point of everybody’s visit to the property.
Atlantic City’s casino market has been in steady decline in recent years due to regional competition and changing consumer habits. Out of all the casinos I visited there, Ocean Casino Resort felt the most like it had a good idea of what Atlantic City should become to have a chance at another golden era.
Ziv Chen is CEO of Major League Content, which he founded after serving for over two decades in the gambling industry. Before combining his passion for writing with his love of gambling, Steve served in senior roles with leading slots providers and industry operators.

© 2026 CDC Gaming

source