Spinsane

After more than 20 years in online gaming, I thought I’d seen it all. That was until NetEnt announced their Spinsane slot. Fact is that even after reading the paytable and rules repeatedly, I still had not really understood what was going on. I know, very embarrassing. The slot has more blanks than symbol positions and an awkward arrangement for the paylines, yet a potential for wins of up to 5,000 times your bet. And there is some sort of respin feature that I just couldn’t find out how it is triggering. Let’s dig in to see whether we can figure it all out.

Slot Details

Spinsane is a video slot with five reels, three rows and 27 fixed pay lines. Yeah, that is not a typo and will probably confuse you at the beginning. Playable on mobile and desktop devices, the bet size range from 0.10 to an insane 500 credits per spin. The RTP of this high variance game is set at 96.26%.

Graphics and Visuals

My cluelessness extends to the design as I just can’t figure out what theme the creators had in mind. While the reels are populated with symbols associated with wolves, the reminder looks more like a retro-design of real reels from yesteryear slot machines. A small display on top of the game window lights up on every spin and might stay on if any of the random features is triggered. The soundtrack is rather generic and only interrupted by occasional wolf howls. The most visible animations are constant light flashings on teaser and extended spins as well as when minimum two scatters appear on the front reels. It becomes rather annoying over time.

Pay Symbols

Let’s start at the other end of the paytable and first mention the special symbols. There is a wild symbol that appears stacked at all times and substitutes for all symbols bar the scatter. A wolf howling to a full moon is the scatter and also appears stacked.

There are only three pay symbols in two versions and a lot of blanks on the reels. Three are regular symbols and the other three super symbols. You have a wolf tooth amulet, a wolf’s paw and the wolf himself. The standard version is the regular symbol paying 2.5x, 10x and 50x your bet for a five of a kind. The same symbols marked with a paw stroke are the super symbols, awarding wins of 25x, 100x and 500x your bet. The super symbols can substitute for regular symbols but not vice versa.

The Random Suspense Effect

Occasionally, you will see all bells and whistles, as well as lights coming on in the base game that will announce the trigger of something which mostly ends in a dead spin. One could say, it is indeed just a suspense effect. I observed two features:

• Respin – One reel respins while the other four are held in place to potentially land a missing symbol or scatter.
• Nudge – One reel nudges up or down to bring the missing symbol into view.

The Spinsane Free Spins Feature

Hit minimum five scatters anywhere on the reels in one spin to trigger the feature. You will receive two free spins for each scatter, e.g. five scatters will get you 10 free spins. During the feature, any scatter landing will award +1 free spins, no limits. To be honest, after playing out over 40 bonus features, I questioned myself what the intention of the feature is. You’ll get one wild reel that stays throughout the free spins and jumps to a random reel on every spin. That’s it.

Final Verdict

NetEnt seems to have a real talent to take a nose dive after releasing a blockbuster slot. For example, we had the toothless and useless Temple of Nudges following the emphatically celebrated Scudamore’s Super Stakes slot. Now, I accept that they are trying to cover the entire player preference spectrum but does it have to be that bad? Spinsane had nothing for me that would want me to play it again. But who knows, some people might like Spinsane, maybe “insane” players (pun intended).

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