Beat the Beast Kraken's Lair Slot – Free Demo

One emblem does every job on these reels

The tales mariners recounted about the kraken were truly savage, and in the ancient Nordic chronicles the monster was huge enough to be confused for an island. It was reported to haul entire vessels under with a lone swipe of its limbs, and generations of crews are presumed to have gone down that way. This ocean themed slot arrives with a lone symbol that functions as wild and scatter at the same time, and it also carries expanding wins and a free spin feature. Both of those run off the same emblem, so one symbol is the trigger condition for everything the game does.

Nine pay ways in the deeps

5-reel, 9-payway slot is built to operate on most devices, and it can be played on your mobile, tablet or dekstop computer from between 0.10 and 100 credits per spin. The pay ways are fixed, and a win is read left to right from the first reel. The reels are situated in the deeps beside the creature itself. I ran it at 5.00 a spin for 300 spins from a starting balance of 5,000.00. They are constructed around a compact symbol set, and the most profitable symbol is the purple kraken, which delivers 500 times the stake for 5 across a payline. Beat the Beast Quetzalcoatl's Trial is another entry in the same series, and Turning Totems is another Thunderkick title from the same studio.

What expands, and what does not

The symbol that matters is the Kraken Emblem, which is wild and scatter at once. As a wild it substitutes for other symbols in winning combinations, in the base game and in the bonus alike. When a win includes it, the winning symbol beside it expands to blanket the entire reel, paying whatever combinations arise, but the symbol itself does not expand. That is what happened on spin 124 of my session, where the expansion took the spin to 50.00, ten times the stake. Three, four or five of them also pay 2x, 20x and 200x the bet on their own. Those scatter pays come in addition to the bonus trigger, not instead of it. The slot's max win is 7,777 times the stake.

Ten spins, one added emblem each

A free spin feature is bundled as well. It is the game's only feature beyond the expanding win. It is triggered by landing three or more Kraken Emblems anywhere on the reels, granting 10 spins from start with retriggers under no stated limit, each worth 10 more. Three emblems brought it in once across my 300 spins, on spin 105. The bonus is played in the same fashion as the base game, except that an additional Kraken Emblem is inserted at a random spot on every free spin. That puts a wild on the reels for every spin of the round.

Three hundred spins at 5.00

Here the game made me wait. The longest run without a win was 21 spins, ending on spin 171, and 24 of the 44 paying spins returned less than the stake. Over 300 spins at 5.00 I got 601.50 back from 1,500.00 staked, a 40.1% return, with only 44 paying spins and one bonus, on spin 105, worth 51x the stake and 42% of everything I won, and the balance never once rose above the 5,000.00 I started with.

Minty’s Final Note: The double duty symbol carries the wild and the scatter role. That one round ran its 10 free spins without a retrigger and paid 255.00, 51 times the stake.