Spinsane Slot – Free Demo

The wolf works himself up

It doesn't get much crisper than it does in Spinsane from studio NetEnt, if you're seeking a touch of chilly evening air to accompany your online slot play. My own run through it lasted 474 spins at a stake of 5.00. Spinsane is not merely a peculiar title. It depicts the game's central character and the condition he works himself into during the bonus round, and there self-control goes out the window as a wild reel seizes the screen, literally in some instances, for the length of the round. That wild reel exists in the bonus round and nowhere else. For a harsh look at life in the pack, let's have a look at Spinsane.

Spinsane's moonlit play unfolds on a 5x3 sized grid. Blank spaces sit on the reels alongside the symbols. It offers players with 27 fixed bet lines to land winning combinations across, and wins pay in sequence from the leftmost reel to the rightmost reel. In my session 103 of those 474 spins paid something back, 22% of them. Only the biggest win per bet line is paid. Of the 103 paying spins, 43 returned less than the 5.00 stake. Perhaps it's the game's nocturnal theme, but Spinsane holds an outrageous feel-bad quality before even pressing the spin button to see what it can achieve.

What the 2,370.00 bought

It is a NetEnt slot. My run returned 58.0% of the 2,370.00 I put through it. Two things you can count on behind the scenes are a sturdy RTP, in this case, 96.26%, and a highly volatile math model, rated 4 out of 5.

Six pay symbols, three of them slashed

Throughout the game, the symbols you'll encounter include the pay symbols, a wild and a scatter, and pay symbols are split into the claw pendant, the paw, and the wolf. That makes six pay symbols in all, three regular and three super. Each of those three also has a super version, marked with orange claw slashes. A super wolf landing beside regular wolves completes the line as a wolf. A super symbol stands in for the ordinary symbol of the same sort. It occupies a single position, the same as any other symbol. So it pays the highest possible winning combination on each winning bet line, while being the key to many of the game's largest lines.

The Overlay Wild Reel picks a column

Spinsane arrives with three features. Only one of the three, the wild reel, is locked to the bonus round. One is Super symbols, another is free spins, where the Overlay Wild Reel extra enters into play, and the Wild shows up anywhere on reels 2 to 5, in the main game and in Free Spins. So the wild is the part of that list you can meet on an ordinary spin. It stands in for all symbols except Scatter when it lands. Scatters are the one symbol it cannot cover. It never lands on reel 1. That leaves reel 1 to fill itself, in the main game and in the bonus round alike.

Free spins are launched if five or more scatter symbols are in sight anywhere on the reels. They do not need to sit on a bet line. Players begin with double the number of scatters that triggered the round. Six scatters would open the round with 12 spins. So the smallest award is 10, and every trigger award is an even number.

1 / 2

That's not all the round does, though, and now, when scatter symbols land during free spins, each one awards one extra free spin. The rules set no ceiling on how far retriggers can stretch a round, and the one I played did retrigger. For every free spin, one random reel of reels 2 to 5 turns wild in full. Reel 1 is never the one chosen.

The Minty Take: One bonus round across 474 spins paid 31 times the stake and made up 11% of everything I won, so the other 89% had to come off base-game lines, and 43 of my 103 paying spins came back under the stake I had put in.

474 spins with the pack

Spinsane is one of those games that is very simple to fall for, and its unwelcoming mood pulls you in, with chunky visuals that gesture towards older sprite-based video games. It held my 1,000.00 starting balance for 474 spins before the money ran out. The sort that didn't have as many pixels to work with so had to make every single one matter to paint believable characters, and there are several of those in Spinsane. The wolf, the paw and the claw pendant carry the paytable between them. None more so than the huge grey wolf himself. He sits at the top of that table, and his super version above him.

You'll want to see this game's reels devoured whole, unlike the present fashion for trimming down the wild count. The overlay covers a whole reel, top to bottom. Not by one symbol, this time, but by a full overlay wild reel connecting as many symbols as possible during free spins, and yes, the super wolf is the symbol you want filling that line. My best spin did not come from the bonus round at all. The biggest payout recorded during my 474 spins was 48 times the stake, though. That was spin 389, worth 240.00 at the 5.00 stake, and it left the balance at 307.00.

That might not seem like a whole lot of winnings now, compared to what NetEnt has produced since. The next best of my run was 130.00 on spin 57, 26 times the stake. However, the relatively modest potential doesn't diminish the thrill of getting an overlay wild reel during free spins, dropping into a fresh position from one spin to the next and joining win lines. The balance peaked at 1,047.00 on spin 84. It's not going to hand you a large round every time free spins trigger, and in fact, it can appear the reels refuse you anything at all at times - my longest stretch without a win ran to 31 spins. That drought ended on spin 178. The one bonus round I saw paid 31 times the stake, 11% of everything I won across a session that returned 58.0%. It took the balance from 858.00 to 1,008.00. Get the reel where you need it, though, and you can watch it stitch a line together.