Get Kraken

Get Kraken by Yggdrasil takes the player down to a shipwrecked seabed, and the presiding character is not the menacing sea monster the name suggests. The kraken here is a grinning purple octopus with oversized eyes, peering out from behind a battered treasure chest – comic rather than threatening, and drawn in the slightly cartoonish style the studio uses for its lighter releases.

The setting around him is genuinely well built. Shafts of light fall through purple water, bubbles drift up past the reels, sunken chests sit open on either side spilling coins, and the whole scene has enough depth that the grid appears to be floating in front of it rather than pasted on top.

The layout is a 5x3 grid running 40 paylines, filled with sunken loot: gold coins, cut gems, jewelled scrolls and royal-blue playing card symbols carved as if salvaged from a wreck. Stakes run from 0.10 to 100 per spin.

The heart of the game is the kraken collection, and it is the mechanic that separates this from every other 40-line slot. Every kraken symbol that lands is counted on a panel down the right-hand side, and filling that meter unlocks the bonus rounds in sequence – not one bonus, but three, arriving one after another.

The panel lists them in order: Boost Bonus first, then Multi Bonus, then Respin Bonus, with a line beneath reading “All krakens active!” at the bottom. Each one lights up as the collection reaches it, so the state of your progress is legible at a glance without opening anything.

That staged structure is the game’s best idea. Most slots hold their feature behind a single threshold: you either trigger it or you do not. Here the collection has four distinct milestones, so a session that never reaches the top has still passed through two or three genuine improvements along the way, and the base game always has somewhere to be going.

Between rounds, sticky symbols, nudges and random multipliers keep the grid moving, and a wild steps in for the regular symbols. That is a busier base game than most collection slots offer – the usual approach is to keep the reels quiet so the meter is the only thing happening, and Yggdrasil has deliberately gone the other way.

Four fixed jackpots sit alongside the reels in coloured plaques: Grand, Major, Minor and Mini. At a $25.00 stake the Grand read $25,000.00, the Major $2,500.00 and the Mini $125.00 – multipliers of 1,000x, 100x and 5x respectively, scaling with whatever you stake. A WINNER banner drops over the plaque when one lands, which is a small piece of theatre the format usually skips.

The free spins add their own coin values and jackpot chances on top of everything else. A round in our session ran to twelve spins with the counter showing progress along the bottom of the screen, and coins carrying $25.00 and $62.50 values sat on the grid while it played – substantial figures against a $25.00 stake.

For players unwilling to wait there are two shortcuts rather than one. The Golden Bet side wager raises the stake in exchange for a better chance of the bonus arriving, and the Buy Bonus button purchases direct entry. The two serve different temperaments: one improves the odds while you keep playing, the other skips the question entirely.

The Golden Bet is the more interesting of the two on a game built like this, because the collection is progressive. Improving your bonus frequency on a slot where each bonus advances a meter towards the next one compounds in a way that a single bought entry does not – you are buying more trips up the ladder rather than one trip.

The numbers are conventional and honest. The RTP is 96%, sitting exactly on the industry standard, and the volatility is medium to high – a fair description of a game where the base reels pay regularly but the real value is concentrated in a staged feature that takes time to reach.

The maximum win is 8,666x the bet, an oddly precise figure that reflects how it is actually reached: the top of the collection with the multipliers and jackpots compounding, rather than any single symbol combination. It also sits well above the 1,000x Grand, which confirms the ceiling comes from the feature rather than the plaque.

In play the session has an unusual shape for a collection game. Because the base reels are busy – 40 lines, sticky symbols, nudges, random multipliers – the balance does not simply drain while the meter fills. There is a genuine second layer of activity, and it makes the wait for the krakens considerably more tolerable than in a game where the grid is deliberately silent.

The presentation supports that. The jackpot plaques stack down the left, the kraken progress panel runs down the right, and the reels sit between them with the octopus behind – three columns of information that never overlap and never crowd each other. It scales down to a phone without losing either panel, which for a game with this much on screen is not trivial.

The comic tone is a deliberate choice worth noting. Sea-monster slots usually reach for menace – dark water, tentacles, doom – and this one reaches for charm instead. Whether that appeals is a matter of taste, but it does give the game an identity in a lobby thumbnail, which is half the battle for any new release.

It is worth spelling out how the three bonus rounds differ, because the panel names them without explaining them. Boost is the entry level, improving what the round pays. Multi adds a multiplier layer on top of that, so the same collected values are worth more. Respin is the one that changes the structure rather than the arithmetic – it keeps the round alive rather than simply making it richer. Reaching all three, with the panel reading “All krakens active”, means you are playing a version of the feature in which the values are higher, the multipliers are applied and the round can extend itself, all at once. That is why the ladder is worth climbing rather than simply a way of dressing up a single bonus.

The forty paylines are the other thing shaping how a session feels, and they are unusually high for a game with this much machinery attached. Most collection slots run ten or twenty lines specifically so the base game stays quiet and the meter is the only thing worth watching. Yggdrasil has gone the other way, and the effect is that the reels compete with the collection for attention – there is almost always something paying, and the kraken count advances almost as a by-product. Whether that is better depends on temperament: it makes the game busier and more forgiving, but it also means the collection never feels like the only thing keeping you at the table.

The jackpot structure rewards a closer look than the plaques suggest. At a $25.00 stake the Mini paid $125.00 – five times the bet – while the Grand paid $25,000.00, a thousand times. That is a spread of two hundred to one between the bottom and top rungs, with the Major and Minor spaced out between them. In practice it means the two lower jackpots are pleasant interruptions rather than results that change a session, and the Grand is the only one that genuinely matters. Reading a jackpot ladder this way before playing is a habit worth developing, because the visual weight the game gives all four plaques is identical while their significance is not.

On the Golden Bet, the arithmetic deserves a moment. Side bets that improve feature frequency are usually priced so that the return stays roughly constant – you are not buying an edge, you are buying a different distribution. What makes it more interesting here than in a standard slot is the staged collection: because each bonus advances you towards the next tier, a higher trigger rate does not simply give you more bonuses, it gives you more progress. On a game with a four-step ladder, that compounding is a real structural difference rather than a marketing claim, and it is the single most useful thing to test during a demo session.

The free spins are worth treating as a separate proposition from the collection rounds. They bring their own coin values and their own jackpot chances, layered on top of whatever the kraken meter has unlocked – so a free spins round arriving while the panel is fully lit is playing with every advantage the game has to offer simultaneously. Our session showed coins carrying $25.00 and $62.50 against a $25.00 stake during a twelve-spin round, which gives a sense of the scale: individual symbols worth one to two and a half times the bet, landing on a grid that is already paying lines.

It suits players who like collection mechanics and want one with more than a single milestone to aim at – the three-stage bonus ladder gives a session a structure that most collectors lack. Anyone who prefers a quiet base game, or who wants a single decisive feature rather than three arriving in sequence, will find it busy.

It is worth spinning the free demo on the left to get a feel for the game before committing real money.

You can try this game on AztecParadise Online Casino. There’s a unique casino bonus offer of 300% up to £2000 for a limited time.