Crazy New Year

ThunderSpin ventures into the holiday season with Crazy New Year. This five-reel slot offers instant payout bonus features, as well as free spins with a win multiplier up to 6x.

Theme

The five reels are set at the North Pole, where jagged mountains and Van Goghian clouds look down upon the frigid snowscape.

Gaming symbols include bug-eyed versions of many beloved holiday icons, such as elves, deer, snowmen, and Christmas trees. The horned Krampus acts as scatter, awarding up to 30 free spins. A clearly perturbed Santa acts as wild, while also doing occasional snow battle with Krampus, to a potential payout of the bet size.

Surprisingly epic music accompanies gameplay, lending an air of gravity to gameplay… it seems as if more than presents are at stake. Lower-value symbols are provided by frosted iterations of the playing card symbols ace through jack.

Betting Options and Functions

AGames is a subsidiary of the Malta-based company BOSS., which offers complete casino packages to its clients. Though not a fully independent designer, however, AGames delivers consistently excellent games on par with anything coming out of industry giants such as Microgaming or NetEnt.

AGames nails the holiday planning here. This slot offers 20 paylines, all paying from left to right. Bet level is adjustable from 1–10, with coin value adjustable from 0.01–1.00 for an overall per-spin bet range of 0.20–200.00 times the betting currency.

Autoplay is available for up to 500 spins, with optional win and loss limits if the feature is engaged through the settings menu, which also allows players to adjust sound and image options, as well as quickspin. The overall theoretical return to player ratio is below-average at 95.1%.

Features

The free spin feature is the key to big wins in Crazy New Year. It is triggered by the Krampus scatter symbol – players receive 20–30 free spins, depending how many symbols trigger the bonus. The feature begins with a double win multiplier.

During free spins, the Krampus symbol remains on the reels, acting as free spin scatter. This is the key to increasing win multipliers during the feature. 2 Krampuses raise the win multiplier to 3x; 5 raise it to 4x; 9 raise it to 5x; and 10 raise it to the maximum of 6x. Each free spin scatter symbol also adds 1 free spin to the total.

A gift symbol is also added to the reels, offering an instant payout of 1 or 2 times the bet size.

Our Take

With the holidays coming around the corner, AGames’ timing in the release of this slot couldn’t be better. The only blemish is its low RTP, which is not a small matter. An underwater slot by AGames, Gold Sea, has a similar structure, but higher RTP, and is therefore more likely to offer fat Christmas stockings instead of coal under the tree.