Release the Kraken Slot

Release the Kraken has one of the better titles in the business and, unusually, a game underneath it that earns the exclamation. This is a sea monster slot where the sea monster is not decoration. It reaches up out of the water in the middle of an ordinary spin and changes the board.

Everything good about it comes from that willingness to interrupt, so this review spends most of its time there.

Release the Kraken Slot: the Basics

Five reels, four rows and twenty paylines in the base game, which makes it a conventional 5 reel slot by Pragmatic Play’s standards. Shipwrecks, treasure, a diver, and a colour palette of deep blue and gold.

Twenty lines is a low number for a modern release, and it is deliberate. The studio has kept the base game deliberately quiet so that the interruptions land harder when they come.

The random features

Pragmatic states that random features are possible on any spin, and this is the part that gives the game its character. The tentacles come up around the reels without warning, without a trigger you can see coming, and rearrange things.

There is a real difference between a slot where you are waiting for three scatters and a slot where any spin at all might turn into an event. It keeps the base game watchable, which is not something you can say about most twenty line games.

It also, in fairness, means you cannot build any sense of progress. Nothing accumulates. You are simply spinning and hoping the sea does something, which some players find liberating and others find maddening.

Roaming Kraken free spins

The free spins round runs on a progressive multiplier and roaming wilds, and the combination is genuinely well designed. Entry is not a fixed number of spins either. You pick chests to determine how many you get, which is a small piece of theatre that costs the game nothing.

Inside the round the paylines double to forty, so the board is immediately worth twice as much per spin. Every wild that lands stays for the duration and starts moving, changing position on each new spin rather than sitting still.

The multiplier begins low and climbs by one every time another wild arrives. Three roaming wilds in early is a completely different round from three arriving on the last spin, and you can feel the difference while it is happening.

That is the trick this game gets right. The bonus builds an argument rather than paying out a lump, and you can tell several spins in advance whether the argument is going your way.

RTP and volatility

Pragmatic quotes 96.50% for the standard configuration and ships lower ones for operators who prefer them. Check the information screen at the UK online casino you are playing at, because the version you get is the operator’s choice and not yours.

Volatility is high. Operator listings put the ceiling at ten thousand times stake, which tells you the return is concentrated in a small number of very good free spins rounds and is being taken out of the ordinary ones.

Conclusion

Release the Kraken is a 2020 game that still holds up, because it solved a problem most studios answer with noise. A quiet base game is only tolerable if something can happen in it, and here something can.

If you liked the sticky wild round in The Dog House, the roaming version here is the same instinct with movement added. It is a better feature. It is also considerably harder to reach, and no amount of theatre changes what the maths is doing while you wait.

18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.