Pragmatic Play · 2022 · tested 2026-09-07
Release the Kraken 2
Release the Kraken 2 demo and review: all 83 bonuses of the run took the first Kraken Offer, and on that policy the slot returned 86% against 96.03% declared, one natural feature per 303 spins.
A game whose free spins begin with a negotiation, and the lab never negotiated: all 83 bonus rounds, natural and bought, opened the first chest the Kraken offered. On that policy the run logged 86.00%, four bonuses above 140x, and fifty purchases that gave back 0.78x.
measured over 10,000 spins · 50 buys
Is Release the Kraken 2 worth playing?
quick answerRelease the Kraken 2 gave back 86.00% of what it took on the demo server, ten thousand rounds, 2.00 each; the 95% band of 75.4 to 96.6% only just reaches the declared 96.03%; the declared figure assumes the player always rejects the Kraken Offer, and the lab did the opposite. Wins landed on 27.4% of spins at a 0.8x median. Thirty-three natural bonuses had a median of 38.1x, and fifty 100x purchases returned 0.776x with twelve of them under a tenth of their price.
Test card
10,000 spins · USD 2.00 bet · every request logged| Spins | 10,000 |
| Bet | USD 2.00 |
| RTP declared | 96.03% |
| RTP measured | 86.00% (95% CI 75.4–96.6) |
| Hit frequency | 27% · every 3.65 |
| Dead streak max / avg | 23 / 3.61 |
| Median hit | 0.80x |
| Max win (base game) | 122.4x · spin 6375 |
| Free spins, natural | 33 · every 303 spins · mean 51.4x |
| Balance start → end | 100,000 → 97,200 |
Play Release the Kraken 2 demo
same math as real play · demo balance
Bonus buy lab
50 buys × 100x · USD 200 eachmean 0.78x · median 0.43x · 39 of 50 below price · best 5.22x · worst 0.01x
| Spins per bonus (avg / min–max) | 9.8 / 4–20 |
| Retriggered | 98% |
| Multiplier total (avg / max) | 1 / 1 |
| Bonuses that paid nothing | 0% |
- Spent
- USD 10,00050 × USD 200
- Returned
- USD 7,76278% · CI95 50–105%
- Net
- −USD 2,238−11.2 buys
- Break-even or better
- 11 / 5022%
- Paid 2× price or more
- 5 / 5010%
- Price in base spins
- 100natural trigger every ~303 spins
One buy costs 100 base spins; a natural bonus came once per 303 spins, so buying reached the feature about 3× faster. Natural bonus paid 51.4x of the bet, bought bonuses averaged 78x.
Risk profile
how much bankroll this run needed| 50 bets | bust at spin 3157 |
| 100 bets | bust at spin 3864 |
| 200 bets | bust at spin 4174 |
One run, one bet size. A different session can bust earlier or never; treat this as a measured example, not a rule.
How it plays
9 rules screens from the game
Five reels, four rows, twenty lines in the base game and forty in the feature, paid left to right. The shark tops the paytable at 10x for five, the octopus wild pays 20x for five on its own and starts paying from two, and the bonus symbol appears on every reel. Nothing cascades. Three random features can fire on a base spin: four or more wilds start a Wild Respin in which the wilds stay and wander while the rest of the reels spin again, a Shifting Stacked Wild on reels two to four slides fully into view and adds 1x to a multiplier for every position it moves, and on a losing spin the Kraken can rearrange the symbols into a guaranteed 20x to 60x win. The log shows 31 rounds with respins, the best 41.1x on round 3803, and the largest base spin, 122.4x on round 6375, was a single evaluation.
Bonus symbols, three or more of them, do not start free spins directly; they open the Kraken Offer. Sixteen chests each hold a combination of spins and multiplier, from 4 spins at 2x up to 20 spins at 10x depending on how many bonus symbols triggered the round. One chest is picked for you at random. You can open it and play what is inside, or reject it, remove chests in groups of four, four, three and three, and take a fresh offer equal to the average of what remains. The rules state the theoretical return on the basis of always rejecting.
The lab accepted the first chest every time, in the 33 natural rounds and the 50 purchases, so every bonus figure here describes that policy. Across those 83 rounds the chest most often held 15 spins at 4x (ten times), then 5 spins at 2x (nine) and 8 spins at 2x (eight); the best chest opened was 20 spins at 6x, once, and 15 spins at 10x, once. Inside the feature wilds stick and move after each spin, a golden wild adds 1x to the round multiplier, and there is no retrigger.
The standard purchase costs 100x and triggers the offer with three to five bonus symbols; the VIP purchase at 250x guarantees five and was not measured. Ante play, 25 units a spin, makes the offer appear more often and disables buying. The rules call the game low volatility, cap wins at 5,000x, declare 96.03% (96.01% with the ante, 96.05% for the VIP buy) with stakes of 0.20 up to 300.
Wild symbol
Sticky symbol
Multiplier
Respin
Free spins
Scatter symbol
Bonus game
Bonus buy
Extra bet
Bet range 0.20 – 60,000 per spin · payouts read from the game's paytable at bet 2.00
Gallery
9 frames from the test
Verdict
who it suits, who should skip itFor the first three thousand spins this looked like a winning game: 172 bets up at spin 500, a peak of 449 up at round 1765, still 39 up at spin 3,000. Then the bonuses thinned out and the slope turned. The balance was 566 bets down at 5,000, 908 at 7,000 and 1,400 at the close, which was also its lowest point; the 50-bet stake lasted 3,157 spins, the 100-bet stake 3,864 and the 200-bet stake 4,174, among the longest survivals in the lab, behind only Wolf Gold, because the slide was gentle rather than deep.
The reels between features are what the label promises: a win every 3.65 spins, a median hit of 0.8x, only three dead runs of 20 or more (the longest 23, rounds 6906 to 6928), 58 base rounds above 20x and one above 100x. The random features showed up as 31 respin rounds and a handful of multiplied single spins, 122.4x, 83x, 75x and 64x among them.
Here the feature is where the policy matters. Thirty-three natural triggers, one per 303 spins with a 1,031-spin gap between rounds 5299 and 6330, averaged 51.4x with a median of 38.1x; four passed 140x, all of them chests with 10 to 15 spins, and nine finished under 10x, most of them 5- or 6-spin chests. The offer you accept decides the round before it starts: round 1697 opened a 5-spin chest and paid 2x, round 1743 opened a 12-spin chest and paid 199.5x.
The fifty 200-unit purchases returned 7,762, or 0.776x, with a median of 0.4325x. Twelve of the fifty came back below a tenth of their price, 39 below price, eleven at or above it; the five above 2x were led by buy 8 at 5.22x from a 15-spin chest, and the floor was buy 26 at 0.007x. The gap between 0.776x and the game's declared return is the price of taking the first offer: a player who rejects and plays the elimination rounds is the one the 96.03% is written for, and this log does not measure that player.
- Fixed bankrolls lasted 3,157 to 4,174 spins, among the longest in the lab
- Natural bonuses of 144.8x to 199.5x, four of them, in the first third of the run
- A win every 3.65 spins and no dead run past 23
- An 86.00% run with the first offer always accepted; the declared 96.03% assumes a different strategy
- Purchases came back at 0.776x, twelve of fifty under a tenth of the price
- Nine natural bonuses out of 33 stayed under 10x, the smallest 2x
- The balance ended at its lowest point, 1,400 bets down
- All 83 bonus rounds opened the first chest; the chests held 15 spins at 4x ten times and 5 spins at 2x nine times.
- A 12-spin chest on round 1743 paid 199.5x; a 5-spin chest on round 1697, forty-six spins earlier, paid 2x: same trigger, different box.
- The four bonuses above 140x all came in the first 3,200 spins; the remaining 6,800 spins produced no bonus above 84x.
- One base spin, round 6375, paid 122.4x, more than 29 of the 33 natural bonuses.
- Twelve of fifty purchases returned under 0.1x, because a 4- or 5-spin chest at 1x or 2x rarely pays much.
Method & data
open data · closed rig10000 base-game spins at a fixed USD 2.0 bet; 50 bonus buys at 200.0 each (100.0x) on the official Pragmatic Play demo server (jurisdiction 99, RTP profile 96.03%); every request and response logged; test run 2026-09-07.
The test rig plays the official demo build over the network and records every server round: bet, win, cascade steps, free spins, collect. Screenshots and video come from a real browser session. A human editor checks the numbers and the text before publication. How we test →
| 2026-09-07 | 10,000 spins · RTP 86.0% |
FAQ
6 questions · answered from the logAccepting every Kraken Offer: why?
For the same reason it buys the standard feature and takes the first free-spins option in other games: one fixed policy makes 83 rounds comparable with each other and repeatable next time. The cost is that the game's declared return is computed for the opposite policy, always rejecting, so this run's 86.00% is not the number the rules promise and should not be read as a measurement of it.
What was inside the chests?
Across 33 natural rounds and 50 purchases the first chest held 15 spins at 4x most often, ten times, followed by 5 spins at 2x nine times and 8 spins at 2x eight times. The top of the table, 20 spins at 6x and 15 spins at 10x, each appeared once. A three-symbol trigger cannot hold the 20-spin chests at all; those need four or five bonus symbols.
Is rejecting the offer really better?
The rules say the theoretical 96.03% assumes it, which means the elimination rounds carry the value on average. The lab cannot confirm the size of the difference because it did not play that way; what it can say is that accepting produced a 38.1x median natural bonus and a 0.776x return on purchases in this run.
Between bonuses, what does the base game do?
Quietly and steadily, as the low-volatility label suggests: 27.4% of spins paid, the typical win was 0.8x, and the longest run without a win was 23 spins. Wild Respins fired 31 times for up to 41.1x, and multiplied single spins reached 122.4x once. None of that was enough to offset a slow slide from round 1765 onward.
Standard buy or VIP buy?
The lab tested the standard 100x version, which triggers the offer with three to five bonus symbols at random; it returned 0.776x over fifty tries. The VIP version at 250x guarantees five symbols, which unlocks the 20-spin chests and the 10x multipliers, and was not measured.
Ante bet and the offer: any link?
No, it only changes how often the offer appears: at 25 units a spin rather than 20 the trigger rate rises and the buy button is disabled. Regular play triggered once per 303 spins here. The chests and the reject-or-accept mechanics are the same in either mode.
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Field notes
0 notes