Release the Kraken 2 — Free Demo & Game Details

A refined round surrounded by decisions that do not pay

I read Release the Kraken 2 as one good idea and four decisions, and the arithmetic turns each decision into a trap or a wash. The good idea is the free spins round. The decisions are the Kraken Offer, the ante and the two buys, and not one of them lifts the 96.03% standard return by more than two hundredths of a point. That is my case for a 6.3: the round earns its place, and what the game builds around it either costs the player or changes nothing.

The round is not an invention. The Dog House keeps every wild that lands in its free spins until the round ends, and Wild West Gold does the same, so each spin plays on the board the previous one left. Here the wilds roam to a random position after each spin, and each GOLDEN WILD lifts the round multiplier by 1x for the rest of the round, so on 40 lines the board and the multiplier grow together. I rate both as sound refinements of a sticky-wild round. The damage comes from what the sequel puts in front of it: a chest game that fixes the round's length and starting multiplier before the first spin, in a round that cannot retrigger.

The Kraken Offer is a random draw dressed as a negotiation

Each chest pool holds 16 chests. One is set aside unopened, the player clears 14 more in blocks of 4, 4, 3 and 3, and the last choice is between the set-aside chest and the one left over. Neither of those two is opened before the pick, so whichever one the player keeps is worth the pool's average chest in expectation. Declining every offer, the play the return assumes, reduces the chest game to a random draw from sixteen chests with extra clicks in front.

I find no reason to accept an offer. Each is the rounded-down average of the chests still in play, and rounding down only ever moves against the player. Averaging costs something subtler as well. Each WILD that lands in the round stays until the round ends, so the ninth spin of a long round plays on a board holding the wilds of the first eight, and a round's value grows faster than its spin count. An offer that averages the spin count shaves off the long draws that carry the round and swaps them for a middle length the wilds have less time to use.

The pool matters as much as the decision. Three BONUS symbols give 4 to 15 spins at 1x to 6x, four give 5 to 20 spins at 1x to 10x, and five give 6 to 20 spins at 1x to 10x. The random BONUS explosion lands exactly three, so that route in opens the weakest pool every time, where the bottom of the range is four spins.

The ante sells pace and charges for it everywhere else

The ante raises the stake from 20 coins to 25 so that BONUS symbols land more often. The rest of its numbers, once priced per coin, move the wrong way or stay put. The return drops from 96.03% to 96.01%. Line pays do not grow with the ante, so against the larger stake each is worth four fifths of its face value. The cap falls to 4,000x the ante stake, and 4,000 times 25 coins is 100,000 coins, exactly what 5,000x of a 20-coin spin comes to.

The cap odds say the same once they are priced per coin. At 1 in 18,183,695 standard spins of 20 coins, the cap comes once per 363.7 million coins staked on average. With the ante on it is 1 in 15,386,461 spins of 25 coins, once per 384.7 million coins, about 6% more stake for each cap. The ante makes the cap roughly 18% likelier per spin by charging 25% more for every spin, and it switches off both buys while it is on. I would leave it off.

The VIP buy pays 150x more for the same 5,000x

I price both buys the same way, by what they return and how far their ceiling sits above their cost. The 100x STANDARD FREE SPINS buy returns 96.03%, the same as base play. On average it hands back 96.03x, a cost of 3.97x per purchase, which is exactly the edge the base game takes from 100x of spins. It is fairly priced in the narrow sense that buying is no worse than spinning, and no bargain. It opens the round with three to five BONUS symbols at random, so any pool can come up, and its best case is the 5,000x cap, 50 times its own cost.

The 250x VIP FREE SPINS buy returns 96.05%. On average it hands back 240.125x, a cost of 9.875x per purchase, close to two and a half times the loss on the cheaper buy for a return two hundredths of a point higher. Its best case is the same 5,000x, now only 20 times its cost. What the extra 150x buys is the five-BONUS pool, and that pool still holds 8 spins at 1x and 6 spins at 2x. Measured as spins times starting multiplier those chests are worth 8 and 12, well under the roughly 29 of an average chest in the three-BONUS pool that a random explosion hands out without a purchase. The VIP buy raises the money riding on a round two and a half times and leaves the ceiling where it was. That is variance bought at full price, with less headroom for every coin spent.

The 5,000x cap is a free spins number

The paytable cannot approach the cap on its own. Five wilds pay 20x, so a base-game screen with five wilds on all 20 lines pays 400x, 8% of the cap. I count seven of the nine regular symbols paying 4x or less for five on a line. Guaranteed Win tops out at 60x. Inside the base game, the Shifting Stacked Wilds multiplier and a chain of Wild Respins are what can carry a win past 400x.

Free spins double the lines to 40, so a full screen of wilds pays 800x before the multiplier, less than a sixth of the cap. The multiplier supplies the rest. At 6x, the top start in the weakest pool, that full screen comes to 4,800x, still short. At 10x, the top start in the other two pools, a single spin needs 500x of line wins, 25 of the 40 lines paying five wilds, to end the round at the cap by itself. The practical route is the one the round is built for: a long draw, wilds piling up and GOLDEN WILDs lifting the multiplier while the total accumulates across spins.

That makes the chest draw the real gatekeeper, and the cap a small share of what the game pays. A 1 in 18,183,695 chance of 5,000x is worth about 0.000275 of the stake per spin, under three hundredths of a percentage point of the 96.03% return, so more than 99.9% of the return comes from wins below the cap. For a game at five out of five volatility, 5,000x is a low ceiling, and a draw of four or five spins at 1x or 2x gives the roaming wilds very little time to pile up.

It suits a patient player at the right casino

The game suits someone who wants a sticky-wild round in the Dog House mould with a rising multiplier on top, and who is content to wait for it at the standard stake, with the ante off and every Kraken Offer declined. That player gets the full 96.03%, or 96.50% where a casino runs the higher setting, and the rules screen shows which. At the 93.98% setting the same game returns 2.52 points less than at 96.50%, 2.52x more lost on average per 100x staked, which is more than a hundred times the largest gain any in-game choice offers.

I would send bonus buyers elsewhere. The 100x buy is return-neutral, the 250x buy spends two and a half times as much against the same ceiling, and neither is offered in the UK version. Anyone chasing a high ceiling belongs elsewhere too, because 5,000x at five out of five volatility is modest. My 6.3 comes down to this: the one thing the game does well, a round that snowballs, has its length set by a random chest and its top set by a low cap, and every lever handed to the player around it is a trap or a wash.