In the world of online slots sometimes features and themes are just on trend. Right now, the Kraken is having its day. After Thunderkick’s Beat the Beast: Kraken’s Lair, now we get another high variance slot, Pragmatic Play’s Release the Kraken.

The Kraken is a mythical Scandanavian giant sea squid that terrorizes sailors in various Norse legends, pulling ships into the inky depths with its huge tentacles. Here, its brave slots players who are being terrorized by one beast of a high variances game – it teases you with its Wild features in the base game though really it’s the free spins round that unlocks treasures in win sequences that combine free spins and multipliers to good effect.

The reel set starts above water, with 5 reels and 4 rows visible. You can just about make out a ship bobbing up and down on the waves behind them, with the Kraken’s tentacles waving ominously above, just waiting to grab your vessel and take it down to the depths. It’s all quite cartoon-y but fun nonetheless. Initially there are 20 paylines but this increases to 40 in the bonus round.

Low value symbols are represented by the cards, Jack through to Ace. The premiums are green and blue fish, a turtle and a shark. The game logo is also a premium and pays out 25x for five on a payline.  Look out as well for the Wild and its feature variations, as well as the Bonus and Chest Bonus symbols that are required to unlock more features.

This is a high variance game so be ready for a ton of dry spins, but also note that the top payout is a hefty 10,000x and the RTP sits at a reasonable 96.5%.

Random Spin Features

The Kraken offers you a choice of three modifiers at random during the base game, each introducing wilds to drive more wins. These wilds all operate as normal, substituting for any symbol bar the special bonus ones and scatters to create win lines:

Kraken Lockin’ Wilds – Three chests will be revealed and you must open each to find either ‘More Wilds’ (adds more wild symbols to the game), ‘Continue Spinning’ (no prize, just keep going) or ‘All Wins x2 and Collect’ (gives you a 2x multiplier on your wins), ‘Collect’ (ends the feature).

Colossal Kraken Wilds – A 3×4 wild symbols is added to the reels and GUARANTEED to land on each spin.

Infectious Kraken Wilds – Adds one or more to the reel – they turn adjacent symbols into wilds.

Sunken Treasure Bonus

This is triggered by landing a bonus symbol on reels 1 and 3, and a Chest on reel 5. 

Three new treasure chests appear to be opened and reveal cash prizes. You keep opening more and more chests until you see a ‘Collect’ notice when you take your winnings and return to the main game.

Roaming Kraken Free Spins

This is where it’s at! You’ll need a bonus symbol on reels 1 and 3 PLUS a free spins symbol  on reel 5. Here you get to choose from treasure chests again to reveal how many free spins you get, up to 10. Play continues until you get a ‘Collect’ message from one of the chests when you return to the main game.

The good thing about the bonus round is that here you’ll get 40 paylines to play on instead of 20. The free spins round also comes with a tasty progressive multiplier that starts at 1x and increases by 1x with every wild that lands.

And …

Any wild that lands during the round remains throughout the free spins and roams the reels on each spin.

Release the Kraken is a fun and engaging high variance game from Pragmatic Play. The potential in the base game is best when the Colossal Wilds are in play, creating the chance to fill three reels entirely with wilds. This gets even better when the 40 paylines are in play in the bonus game, and with a multiplier thrown in you can win up to 10,000x in a spin. If you like this one you might also like another recent game of theirs, the haunted Mysterious slot.