Chaos Crew 2 Slot – Free Demo

The Cranky Cat carries a number

Sequels are one sort of game you know you've never seen the last of, and the theme is a recurring favourite amongst creators, who come back time and again to inject some brawn into their game. The welcome news is there are makers like Hacksaw Gaming who can take an ordinary notion like a sequel. The Cranky Cat handles the wild duty here, and it never lands without a multiplier value attached to it. They come up with something pleasingly distinctive. Here we have Chaos Crew 2. It blends a recognisably Hacksaw appearance with a fixed payline win system and wild multipliers, climaxing in the Bonus round.

Chaos Crew 2 is divided into two stages, base and bonus. The base game is where both scatter types live, since the Bonus and Best of Bonus symbols appear nowhere else. One is played out across the full paytable, the other pared back to non-paying and multiplier symbols only, so add it all up, and Chaos Crew 2 offers quite a distinctive atmosphere, boosted by the ingenious features Hacksaw has blended in.

Nineteen fixed lines on a 5x5 grid

One of Chaos Crew 2's slightly less uncommon elements is its pay system, where symbols align from the left-hand side of the grid, on 19 fixed paylines running from the leftmost reel. Only the highest win on each winning way is paid, and separate wins in the same round are added together. The game area is organised in a 5-reel, 5-row layout. Symbols have to sit on adjacent reels, so a combination starts on reel one and carries on without a gap. Chaos Crew 2 is a highly volatile slot, as you might have surmised from the title. In my own run the longest stretch without a single paying spin reached 17, ending on spin 61. It yields an RTP of 96.27%, whilst providing bets from 10 p/c to $/€50 per spin. The buy options carry their own return figures, running from 96.22% on the Bonushunt FeatureSpins to 96.35% on the Epic Drop FeatureSpins.

How the Bonus stacks its reel multipliers

Players gain from a wild multiplier feature in the base game. At most one Cranky Cat can land on each reel at a time while the base game is running. It helps boost wins while spinning for the opportunity to unlock the Bonus – or purchase it if feasible. Feature buys are allowed to cost more than the 50.00 top of the bet range.

The Cranky Cat is the wild multiplier. Every winning combination it takes part in is multiplied by the value it carries. It substitutes for all paytable symbols and bears a value of x2, x3, x4, x5, x10 or x20, and when several of them participate in the same win, their values multiply each other. Epic Drop has a chance to activate at random at the start of a base-game spin, morphing the game into the Bonus for that spin with a minimum of five multiplier symbols dropping in to give their multipliers, and on the next spin it reverts to the usual base game.

The Bonus symbols are scatter symbols, and 3 in sight awards the Bonus, while during the Bonus, only non-paying and multiplier symbols show up. The multiplier symbols come in four kinds. Each reel bears a multiplier that begins at 1x and swells as multiplier symbols land. A plain Cranky Cat applies its value to the reel multiplier it landed on once, while the Sticky version stays on the grid and does it again on every subsequent spin. The round operates on 3 refilling lives, one life per spin. The Epic Cranky Cat multiplies its value with all five reel multipliers instead, and the Epic Sticky one keeps doing that for the rest of the round. Every multiplier symbol that lands resets them, so there is no fixed spin count and no retrigger. Values on all of these symbols run from x2 up to x20, the same set the base-game wild uses. At the end all reel multipliers are added together and multiplied with the bet. If the win cap is reached the round ends there and then, and anything left of the feature is discarded. Four scatters award the Super Bonus instead. The first spin there guarantees at least 7 multiplier symbols, and the Best of Bonus scatter alongside them turns either round into three rounds in a row with the highest meter value paid. Each of the three is played out in full and its result stored on a scoreboard next to the grid.

Players can purchase the feature from the main game, and once purchased, a game round begins with a guaranteed Bonus trigger. The buy menu also carries a FeatureSpins option, where each spin guarantees certain features at a set cost based on the current bet level, and those spins stay active until they are switched off.

A brute that looks good doing it

True to its slightly corny title, Chaos Crew 2 is indeed a chaotic brute, though it's not just a volatile math model supplying thrills. My run peaked at 1,008.00 on spin 4 and never climbed back above the 1,000.00 it started with. Chaos Crew 2 looks splendid, having a classic Hacksaw Gaming character to it. It strikes a pleasing balance. It is not too cartoonish, nor too grim either. The Pyramid sits at the top of the regular paytable, with the Diamond and the Lightning smiley beneath it.

The gameplay flows as smooth as you like it. It delivers heaps of highly amusing moments as well, and the fixed payline notion isn't exactly fresh, appearing in games all over the place. The 19 lines are fixed, so there is nothing to set before a spin beyond the stake. The way it is wired into the multipliers here lends the game an extra pinch of novelty. Two Cranky Cats in the same win multiply each other, so an x5 next to an x10 leaves the line paying x50. Win multipliers in the base game are a lift when they start to land and pile up. The best of them in my session landed on spin 282, worth 34.00 from a 2.00 stake. But it's the way the reel multipliers combine in the Bonus where their capacity to thrill grows exponentially, and here's where Chaos Crew 2 becomes one of those games that is difficult to halt when it gets on one of its high momentum runs, and where the 20,000 times the bet cap applies in every game mode.

One of the only irritating aspects is how long the game can make you wait for any of that. Over 300 spins at a stake of 2.00, the Bonus never showed once. Total winnings across the run came to 269.00 against 600.00 wagered. Only 54 spins paid anything at all, and 24 of those came back below the stake, while a balance of 1,000.00 moved to 669.00, a return of 44.8%, with the best single hit worth 34.00, or 17 times the stake. The lowest the balance got was 664.20. The game is chaotic, as the title implies, so it can feel like a cumbersome war hammer at times. Spins 125 and 135 paid 32.00 apiece, 16 times the stake, and they were the only other hits of that size. But it is a genuinely distinctive slot that was a heap of fun to play through.

Final Minty Score: Three hundred spins gave back 44.8% of what went in, and the Bonus that carries the whole design stayed shut the entire time, so what I have to go on is the base game and a 34.00 top hit from a 2.00 stake.

The rest of the Crew

The original Chaos Crew might also float your boat, if you liked this game. RIP City, a 2023 Hacksaw Gaming release, runs on the same 19 fixed paylines and the same street-art register.