Spinsane (NetEnt): Review

To be fair, it took us longer than normal to get our heads around Spinsane, and even after completing this review the game still didn’t really add up. What’s even odder is that it’s a NetEnt release, a studio typically associated with reliably polished slots, even if their paytables have been a bit inconsistent in recent years. The irony is that there’s some decent potential here, but the overall production feels so rough that it makes us wonder whether NetEnt is heading down a Microgaming-style path—letting just about anyone handle the heavy lifting.

Booting up Spinsane for the first time raises plenty of questions: why do the reels have missing symbols, what’s with the low-budget presentation, and why wolves? Available on all devices and playable from 10 cents to 500€/$ a spin, it runs on 5 reels with 27 paylines. When you play Spinsane, you’ll make use of Super Symbols that can replace matching symbols to create the best possible winning combination. There’s also a Free Spins bonus in which you receive one wild reel on every spin.

The story—if you can call it that—doesn’t land for us at all. Although it’s wolf-themed, the reels seem to sit inside some kind of laboratory, complete with disco-style lights that flash to mark your wins. The reels also have an odd curved shape, perhaps meant to resemble a compression chamber or something similar. Above the reels there’s a pixelated outline of a howling wolf that starts running during the bonus, but it doesn’t appear to serve any real purpose.

On the reels you’ll find wolf claws, paws, and wolf heads. You’ll also notice versions of the same symbols marked with scratch lines—these are the Super Symbols, and they pay more. The highest-paying regular symbol, the wolf head, awards you 50 times your stake for 5 of a kind. Its Super Symbol version, however, pays 500 times your stake for 5 across a full payline. Super Symbols can stand in for the standard symbols of the same type to produce the highest available winning combination. The “W” acts as the wild and substitutes for all symbols except the scatter, and it can only appear on reels 2, 3, 4 and 5.

As you’ll notice, the symbols never completely fill the reels. Instead, the developers have chosen to include blank spaces for reasons that aren’t clear.

Spinsane (NetEnt): Features

Other than the Super Symbols mechanic, the only additional feature is the Free Spins round, which triggers when you land 5 or more scatters anywhere on the reels. Each scatter is worth 2 free spins, so you’ll begin with at least 10 spins, or up to 30 if you hit a full screen of scatter symbols.

In the free spins round, every scatter that lands in view awards you one extra spin. On top of that, you will always receive one fully stacked wild reel on every spin to give you a boost—something NetEnt strangely labels an “Overlay Wild Reel” in this game. Regardless, the maximum win you can score on a single spin here is 500 times your stake.

Spinsane (NetEnt): Verdict

We’re genuinely left scratching our heads and aren’t quite sure what to do with this one. From a payout perspective, it’s not terrible. In fact, Spinsane can theoretically deliver wins of up to 5000 times your stake, though the odds of that happening feel vanishingly small. Visually and in terms of gameplay, however, it’s painfully dull to spin and unpleasant to look at. Compared to this, even NetEnt’s weakest titles start to seem like gifts from above.

In the end, the only thing keeping this together is the win potential. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that something went seriously off track here, and only NetEnt will know what happened. Perhaps it was handed to an intern—or worse, a bunch of casino streamers. Either way, Spinsane comes across like a wounded wolf that really should be put out of its misery.