Steamrunners Hacksaw Gaming slot review with free demo

Steamrunners

A steampunk-style slot with unusual gameplay mechanics. Visually it turned out pretty good, but the sound effects start getting on your nerves after a while, too much clanging and clicking. The mechanics are built around gas canister grenades, which explode and transform low-paying symbols vertically and horizontally into wilds, and sometimes create a chain reaction on the board, filling the whole field with wilds. On top of that, there is a chance that when a wild is transformed, it can get a random multiplier from x2 to x200. On paper it sounds interesting and promising, and Hacksaw says the max win can be hit in any game mode, but in reality, unfortunately, the game did not surprise me at all. Even if you get lucky and wilds cover the whole board, but no random multipliers land, or only small ones do, the payouts will be tiny. Here you absolutely need to land a fat multiplier on a line of wilds to see anything worthwhile, and that happens extremely rarely. The base game is boring, there are a lot of spins waiting for the bonus, sometimes wild canisters land, but the payouts are tiny, the balance does not hold up, although the volatility is listed as medium. In the regular bonus, the chance of wilds and canisters landing is increased, all multiplier wilds are kept until the end of the bonus, but they land rarely, mostly it is just regular ones, plus the multiplier can double if it gets hit by a chain reaction from a canister. In the top bonus, it is all the same, plus at least one multiplier wild is guaranteed, but usually it does not make much of a difference. In the epic bonus, a canister is guaranteed on every spin, and that already sounds promising, because you can collect fields full of multiplier wilds on every spin. The mechanic is unusual, but the payouts are usually disappointing. To hit big here, you really need to catch something very rare, in all other cases the payouts will be below average. I played it for a while and have not gone back since, there are plenty of much more promising slots.

Steamrunners – a video slot from provider Hacksaw Gaming.

Saw it as soon as it came out, immediately reminded me of the old NetEnt game Steam Tower with hints of Zeppelin 2, so I decided to play. Surprisingly, in the very first session I hit both types of bonus. The first one is nothing special, it starts with eight free spins and just drops sticky wilds. The top one starts with ten free spins and also guarantees an extra wild on every spin. In both bonuses the wilds can come with multipliers and the chance to catch a retrigger for 2 or 4 spins. Basically they don’t differ much. I never got lucky enough in any bonus to win more than x200. The slot played strangely overall, it gave bonuses often but they were all empty. In theory a wild can be up to x200, but I only got either non-multiplied ones or x2-x3. The payouts were just ridiculous – even for almost a full screen of wilds there wasn’t x100. There’s also a hot mod, but I never managed to trigger it. Maybe that’s where all the big hits are.

I would highlight that the slot held the balance well and gave bonuses frequently. Downsides are a relatively small max win and lots of empty bonuses. I didn’t like the slot, I almost don’t go into it anymore. Hacksaw has more interesting games.