Crystal Wolf Infinity Reels: Slot Overview

Back in April we covered how ReelPlay’s Infinity Reels mechanic was set to travel after a deal with Relax Gaming, a partnership that also lets Relax Gaming’s partners slip in through the back door. The first studio to take it on is Boomerang Studios. Stepping away from its usual focus on Asian-market releases, the developer has put the expanding-reels concept to work in a rather offbeat title called Crystal Wolf Infinity Reels.

Up to now, Infinity Reels games have generally been known for strong visuals. Crystal Wolf might make you reconsider that reputation. It’s a strange blend: a Nightmare Before Christmas-style backdrop paired with symbols that resemble leftover prints from the IKEA art aisle. A ghostly, unsettling soundtrack drifts along underneath. Altogether, it’s a combination that’s tough to connect with—partly because of the snowy setting, partly because everything feels like a mismatched patchwork. Something doesn’t quite click. Still, it’s worth looking past first impressions before writing the whole thing off.

You can face the frozen setting on any device, with stakes ranging from 25 p/c up to $/€100 per spin. Official figures are currently thin on the ground, aside from a slightly under-par RTP rating of 95.63%. For volatility context, earlier Infinity Reels titles have tended to sit between medium/high and very high. In testing, wins showed up fairly often, but they were mostly small—particularly in the bonus rounds, even when the grid was heavily packed with moons (more on that below).

If you’re chasing larger payouts, you’ll need to make the most of what Infinity Reels can do. The action begins on a 3×3 sized grid, where three matching symbols from left to right on any row count as a win. When that happens, an extra reel is appended to the right side of the grid, giving you the chance to keep the chain going. If another matching symbol lands on the new reel, another reel is added, and this repeats for as long as fresh winning symbols continue to appear. Once they stop, the win is calculated and the game snaps back to the standard 3×3 layout for the next spin. Note that Crystal Wolf doesn’t include the 888x jackpot for adding 12 reels that appears in other Infinity Reels games.

The symbol set is a bit unusual, with everything rendered in a crystal-like style. The paytable begins with four low-paying card suits (clubs, spades, hearts, diamonds), followed by trees, deer, owls, eagles, and wolves. The five premium symbols pay 0.8 to 4x the bet for 3 of a kind, which may sound modest, but once extra reels start stacking up, totals can rise quickly. Every time a winning symbol lands on an added reel, its value is counted again. For instance, if wolves land across 5 reels, the payout becomes 12x the bet. There’s no wild, though there are a couple of other special symbols available to help lift returns.

Crystal Wolf Infinity Reels: Slot Features

Alongside the Infinity Reels behaviour, the slot includes multiplier symbols and a bonus round you can trigger. The game begins with a default x1 win multiplier, and each time a paw symbol lands, the multiplier increases by +1. The multiplier applies to all wins, including those from features. On a new spin, the multiplier resets back to x1.

The bonus game activates when 3 moon scatters are visible at the end of a spin sequence. It opens with 3 free spins on a grid containing 15 empty individual positions. During the free spins, any new moon symbols that land become locked in place and also grant an extra spin. The round ends when either every position is filled or the free spins counter reaches zero. Each moon then reveals a prize of 1-50 times the bet, and the total is added up.

Crystal Wolf Infinity Reels: Slot Verdict

Credit to Boomerang for aiming for something unusual, but piling together so many odd ingredients doesn’t always create a winning mix. Crystal Wolf sometimes feels weird purely for the sake of being weird—l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake, if you prefer. The trouble is that the execution isn’t strong enough to support that direction. Either Crystal Wolf missed the mark, or the intended idea didn’t come through for us. Either way, once the test session ended, there was no real urge to load it up again.

As Nietzsche suggested, the snag with art for art’s sake is that the artist inevitably reveals themselves through it. Here, that leaves Boomerang’s development strengths and weaknesses on display. Crystal Wolf comes across as fragmented: effects stutter, the pacing feels off, one element plays, then another kicks in, and it all lands in a rough, disjointed way. Put it next to the polish NetEnt brought to Gods of Gold, which uses a comparable dynamic, and Crystal Wolf ends up resembling a video game from well over ten years ago. Considering how impressive Odin Infinity Reels looked, Crystal Wolf feels like a noticeable step backwards.

There’s also the fact that, while Infinity Reels is a capable framework, Boomerang hasn’t really built anything new on top of it. For one, the jackpot found in ReelPlay’s versions for connecting 12 additional reels is missing. Sure, it’s a long shot, but simply knowing it exists encourages extra spins and adds a buzz when you start getting close. Crystal Wolf’s bonus round is also fairly flat. You land some moons, collect a handful of coins, and it’s over. With feature wins during testing typically around 15-30x, enthusiasm drained quickly.

Crystal Wolf isn’t the strongest showcase of Infinity Reels, nor does it push the mechanic forward. The theme might appeal to certain players, but crystal wolves shattering on big wins didn’t feel especially logical, and the rushed, unfinished vibe made it hard to get invested.