Cerberus' Inferno Demo: Stacked Wild Reels and a 243-Way Bonus

Hellhounds, helmets and two different wilds

The board stands in a red hall of tall arches, with stone staircases and hanging chains on either side and a fiery glow below. Five reels, three rows. Cerberus himself, three blue heads with horns and yellow eyes, leads the pay table at 150.00 for five on a line at a €1.00 bet. After him come a golden statue of the three-headed dog, a silver amphora, a bronze crested helmet and a spiked mace, then A, K, Q, J and 10 on grey stone.

Lower down the table is flat. The statue pays 5.00 for three, the amphora 2.50, the helmet and the mace 2.00, and two of a kind pays 1.50 for Cerberus and 0.50 for the other pictures. A and K pay 10.00 for five, Q, J and 10 pay 7.50, and three of any rank return 0.50, half the stake.

Two symbols do the wild work. The Cerberus Emblem, a gold tile with the three heads in a ring, is a scatter and a wild: it substitutes for other symbols in both modes, pays 2.00, 20.00 or 200.00 anywhere for three, four or five, and opens the bonus.

The second wild is a red W on a blue tile, and it never arrives alone.

Wild reels that land already stacked

The rules give the W one line: the Wild symbol always appears as a stacked symbol, covering the whole reel. A full reel of wilds sits on all nine pay lines at once.

In our log a wild reel turned up on 63 of the 748 paid spins that did not start free spins, roughly one spin in twelve. It only ever filled reel 2, 3 or 4, and two wild reels landed together on 15 spins; we never saw three. Those 63 spins paid on 41 occasions and returned €123.50, about a third of the €351.00 the base game paid back, but none of them paid more than 8.5x. All six base-game wins of 10x or more, including the best at 12.5x on spin 630, came without a wild reel.

From nine lines to 243 ways in the Bonus Game

The free spins rewrite the way the board pays. With 243 ways, each of the three positions on a reel connects to all three on the next, so a symbol only has to appear somewhere on consecutive reels from reel 1. The rules picture this as a grid of diamonds joined in every direction, with 243 glowing on both sides of the frame.

A stacked wild reel is worth more under this system. On lines it puts one wild on each of the nine lines; on ways all three of its positions count, so every way that reaches it carries on three times over. In our two rounds, 7 of the 20 free spins had at least one wild reel, a higher share than the base game showed, and the two largest free spins of the first round both had them: 60x on the second spin with reel 3 wild, and 90x on the last, where wild reels 2 and 4 let a five of a kind worth 7.50 count nine times.

The ways do not need a wild to pay well, though. The second round's best two spins, 30.5x and 37.5x on free spins 7 and 8, came with no wild reel at all. Neither round retriggered, and the captured rules mention no multiplier for the free spins.

Two bonus rounds and a long base game: our logged spins

Our log holds 750 paid spins at €1.00, played in Thunderkick's free demo, which gives every session €5,000.00 of credit. They returned €653.50 on €750.00, or 87.1%. Thunderkick's figure is 96.15% for the version on its game page, which the demo loads; a casino may run a different version. For a slot rated Very high, a gap like this after a few hundred spins says nothing about the long run.

• 750paid spins at €1.00 in the demo
• 87.1%of the stakes paid back
• 191xbest round, free spins included
• 2free spins rounds triggered

Something paid on 29.7% of spins, 223 in all, against 23.1% in Kraken's Lair, yet the median win was again 0.5x. The longest losing run lasted 20 spins. In all, 8 spins reached 10x; only the two bonus rounds got past 50x, and both went beyond 100x.

The running total drifted downwards for the first 386 spins and bottomed out at €4,811.50. The next spin opened the 191x round, the best result in the log, and 33 spins later the second round added 111.5x and set the high of €5,087.00 on spin 420. The last 330 spins brought no bonus, and the running total finished at €4,903.50. Without the two rounds, the base game returned 46.8% of the stakes.

We recorded this round in a second demo session for this page, so it is not one of the 750 logged spins. It started on our 577th spin of that session, and the cash went from €4,824.50 to €4,934.00: the round paid €109.50, about 110x the stake, counting the 4.50 that the triggering spin itself paid.

Cerberus' Inferno beside Kraken's Lair and Griffin's Gold

Kraken's Lair, the first game of the series, shares the 5x3 grid, the 9 paylines, the scatter pays of the emblem and the very high rating. It has no separate wild: its Kraken Emblem makes winning lines expand, and its free spins drop an emblem on the reels before every spin. Its cap is 7,777x and its RTP 96.12%; our 750 spins there returned 90.8%.

Thunderkick called Griffin's Gold the series finale. Its Reborn build also plays on nine lines but puts a roaming wild with a climbing multiplier into the free spins, allows up to 22,222x and sells its bonus for 125x the bet.

If ways appeal more than lines, Pink Elephants 2 uses 4,096 connecting pay ways on a 6x4 grid from the very first spin, with a high rating.

Our call on the hellhound

Cerberus' Inferno splits into two games. The base game is a steady trickle of small line wins, with wild reels that help often and pay little; in our log it never passed 12.5x. The Bonus Game is where the 6,666x cap lives, because 243 ways and full wild reels together can pay one combination many times over, as the 90x spin showed.

It suits patient players who accept that the good part may be hundreds of spins away, with no buy to skip the wait. In the demo, count how often the W fills a reel, then let the spins run until three emblems land and watch how differently the same symbols pay on ways.

• Kraken's Lair demo review
• Griffin's Gold demo review
• Esqueleto Explosivo 2 demo review

Cerberus' Inferno: six short answers

Taken from the rules screens, Thunderkick's published figures and our session log.