Release the Kraken — Free Demo & Game Details

The multiplier is nine tenths of this game

Release the Kraken has one good idea and rations it. In Roaming Kraken Free Spins each wild that lands does two jobs: it raises the round's multiplier by 1x for every remaining spin, and it stays on the board, roaming to a new position on each spin that follows. Coverage and multiplier climb together, and that engine is sound. The rationing is in the fuel. A chest pick fixes the round at no more than 12 spins before the first one plays, nothing adds spins once it starts, and the multiplier needs nine wilds to reach its 10x ceiling. Nearly all of the game's upside sits inside a round too short to let that engine compound for long.

The arithmetic of the ceiling shows how much rides on the multiplier. Five wilds or five logos on a line pay 25x the total bet, the top value on the paytable. Across 20 base-game lines that is 500x. The only multiplier in the base game is the single x2 inside Kraken Locking Wilds, so base-game line wins top out at 1,000x, and only a full board inside that feature with the x2 reaches it. Free spins open 40 lines at the same bet per line, which makes a full board at 1x worth 1,000x as well. The 10x multiplier turns that board into the 10,000x cap. On the lines, everything between 1,000x and 10,000x is the free spins multiplier. Nine tenths of the ceiling is multiplier.

One shared multiplier is what sets it apart

Most of the round's parts have a relative. The Dog House puts its Bonus symbols on reels 1, 3 and 5 and keeps the wilds that land in its free spins on the board for the round. Wild West Gold keeps every wild that lands on a 5x4 board and attaches multipliers to them. Wild Walker moves its wilds to new positions between spins. This game combines the moving wild, the growing wild count and the 5x4 board, and changes one thing that matters: its wilds bear no multipliers of their own. Each one feeds a single multiplier that applies to the whole spin.

That change has a cost. A wild that stays put keeps its lines half-built for the rest of the round. A roaming wild lands somewhere random on each spin, so the number of wilds grows while the lines they help complete change every time. The round-wide multiplier is the compensation, because whatever a spin's wilds do complete is paid at the full multiplier. I judge the trade a good one, and it makes the round back-loaded by construction. A wild on the second spin roams and multiplies across every spin after it. A wild on the final spin has nowhere left to roam and no later spin to multiply.

The trigger uses the same three reels as The Dog House and splits the job of reel 5. Ships on reels 1 and 3 need a Free Spins symbol on reel 5 to open the free spins, a Chest Bonus symbol there opens the Sunken Treasure pick round instead, and a pair of ships with neither pays nothing. The wild substitutes for none of the three. The round that holds the multiplier shares its trigger with a pick round.

Twelve spins is too short for this engine

The multiplier starts at 1x and gains 1x per wild, so the ninth wild is the one that reaches 10x. The round lasts 12 spins at most and cannot be retriggered, and it reaches 12 only when the chest pick opens at least four chests before a Collect, because no chest adds more than three spins. Every chest short of that removes spins from the end of the round, which is where a back-loaded round keeps its value.

Timing sets the worth of each wild. On a full 12-spin round, a wild on spin three roams and multiplies across nine later spins, and a wild on spin eleven across one. Past the ninth wild the multiplier stops rising and only coverage keeps growing, so the round's best spins need the multiplier filled early and enough spins left to use it. Twelve leaves little room for both.

Line values this small only make sense next to a multiplier. At 10x, five jacks on one line pay 20x the total bet and three logos pay 25x, the same as five logos pay in the base game. The cap itself is honest: 10,000x is exactly one spin's full board of 25x lines at 10x, not a figure trimmed off a larger paytable. The harder limit is the length the chests allow.

The base game runs on random rescues

Outside the modifiers the 20-line paytable pays little. I count six of the nine regular symbols returning the stake or less for three of a kind, with the queen and the jack at a quarter of it, and four of the nine paying 4x or less for five. The logo sits in tall stacks on the base reels and is the base game's real line payer, and the wild pays at the logo's rate on its own.

Value between bonuses comes from the tentacle pick, which can appear on any base-game spin and starts one of three wild modifiers. The pick shows three tentacles and the modifier behind each is random, so the choice is decoration. Colossal Kraken Wilds drops a wild three reels wide and four rows tall that can hang partly off the visible rows. Infectious Kraken Wilds lands at least one Infectious Wild that turns its neighbours into wilds. Kraken Locking Wilds is the richest of the three: the reels keep spinning while chest choices add locked wilds, and it holds the base game's only multiplier, a single x2. None of the three can pass 1,000x on the lines, and two of them cannot pass 500x.

Spins without a modifier or a trigger return very little. The base game is mostly waiting, and what it waits for is short.

A hundred times the bet buys entry, not length

Buy Free Spins costs 100x the total bet and opens the same chest pick as a landed round. At the full 12 spins that prices each free spin at 8.3x the total bet, and a round half as long costs twice as much per spin. Its best case is the 10,000x cap, 100 times its price. The money buys the door and leaves the variable that most shapes the round, its length, to the same chests that decide a landed round. More spins mean more chances for wilds to land and more spins left to use them, and the buy guarantees none of that. I would not pay 100x for it, and in money terms it is steep at the top of the range: $24,000 a round at the $240 maximum stake, against $20 at the $0.20 minimum.

A competent game that stops its best idea early

The return depends on the casino as well. The standard setting is 96.50%, and the game also runs at 95.50% and 94.50%. At the lowest setting the house edge is 5.5% against 3.5% at standard, about 57% larger. The rules screen shows the setting in use.

The free spins engine is the reason to look at this game. A wild that widens coverage and raises the multiplier for every later spin is a better design than wilds that only pile up, and it deserves more than 12 spins. The game suits a player who wants a base game broken up by random wild modifiers and accepts the free spins as a short event. Anyone who wants retriggers, long compounding rounds or a buy that fixes the round's length should look elsewhere, because none of those exist here, and at high stakes the 100x buy is the part of the game I would avoid. Nine tenths of the ceiling is multiplier, and twelve spins is the most the multiplier ever gets.