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Playtech is back with The Racaroon 2, and if you played the original, you already know these trash pandas aren’t messing around. For this sequel, the developers have swapped the standard 5×3 grid for a diamond-shaped 3-4-5-4-3 layout boasting 720 ways to win. They’ve also bumped the RTP slightly to 95.91% and pushed the max win to a respectable 5,504x.
Beneath the sugary graphics lies a volatile, grind-heavy slot that demands patience. Here is how it played out for me.
The Base Game Illusion & The “Hot Zone”
First thing: the 720 “ways to win” are basically a distraction. The paytable here is incredibly flat. Landing five-of-a-kind of the top premium symbol pays a measly 0.75x your bet, while the lowest royals return just 0.20x. You will almost never cover the cost of your spin with a standard line hit.
Instead, everything in The Racaroon 2 funnels through a single position on the middle reel known as the Hot Zone.
When the Raccoon Wild lands in this center cell, he acts as a collector, scooping up the value of any colored coins (ranging from 0.5x to 5x) scattered across the board. If you miss the center cell, those coins just sit there doing nothing. It’s a frustrating mechanic when the reels don’t align, but over my 80 spins it did hit a few times, including a solid six-coin collect on my very first spin that paid 6.5x.
Unlocking the Multipliers
Face value on those coins won’t make you rich, but there is a clever multiplier system that gives the base game its actual potential.
Above the reels sits a Heart Meter. Every time a “1 Up” symbol lands, the meter climbs one step (from 1x up to 10x). However, this multiplier stays locked until you land an “X” symbol on the exact same spin as a Hot Zone wild collect. When this alignment happens, the X multiplies every collected coin by the heart’s current value. (There’s also a rare “10X” symbol that just drops a flat 10x on your collect, ignoring the meter entirely).
This is where the game finally bares its teeth in a good way. During my session, I built the meter to 3x. When the X symbol finally landed alongside three coins and the Hot Zone wild, it turned a throwaway collect into a nice 7.5x return. A few spins later, another X pulled in an 8x win. The potential is definitely there, but it requires a very specific three-part combo to trigger.
Features: Golden Cake Pick & Hold-and-Win Respins
Every colored coin that lands (collected or not) feeds a fraction of your bet into special progressive prize meters above the grid. These are tied to the Golden Cake feature, a pick-and-click screen that can trigger randomly whenever a coin lands.
I was lucky enough to trigger the Golden Cake late in my session. You pick from 15 boxes until you match three colored macaroons to win one of four progressive prizes, or the fixed 5,000x Grand. I actually got a real sweat going, uncovering two of the three rainbow macaroons needed for the Grand before a third pink macaroon ended the round. The pink prize had crept past 100x my stake by that point, which completely rescued my session and left me 71.65x in profit for the day.
The game also features Racaroon Respins, a traditional Hold & Win bonus triggered if a bonus symbol lands alongside the Hot Zone wild. The grid clears, giving you 3 respins to land coins or “1 Up” symbols. Filling all 18 spots awards the 5,000x Grand. It’s standard stuff, but a welcome break from the base game slog.
What You’re Chasing
The Racaroon 2 lifts its predecessor’s RTP and max win, but steady, frequent action is not what it offers.
Because the entire math model is anchored to that single center cell, a spin without the wild in the Hot Zone is mostly dead weight. What you are chasing is a perfect storm: the wild in the middle, coins on the edges, and an X symbol landing while your heart meter is high.
