Chaos Crew

What these figures mean for Chaos Crew

This catalogue holds both Chaos Crew and its sequel, which makes it one of the few places you can see exactly what a studio changed between a game and its follow-up — in numbers rather than in press copy. Three things moved, and the third is the one nobody advertises.

The ceiling doubled: 10,000x here, 20,000x in Chaos Crew 2. The published return barely moved at all: 96.3% against 96.27%, three hundredths of a point apart, both at the studio's flagship level. And the number of certified RTP builds went from three to four. The original ships at 96.3%, 92.4% and 88.4%. The sequel ships at 96.27%, 94.22%, 92.41% and 88.28%, adding a 94% option in the middle. Same studio, same five-of-five volatility rating, double the top prize, and one more price point for operators to choose from.

That third change is the one to understand, because it is about what a casino pays rather than what you win. Each additional build is a cheaper version of the same game, and the floor in both cases sits around 88.3%. At £1 a spin, the top build here keeps 3.7p and the bottom build keeps 11.6p — the same game costing three times as much, with nothing on screen to tell you which one is running. Adding a fourth option in the sequel gives operators a 94% middle ground; it does nothing for players except widen the range of prices the same game can be sold at.

What this pair also shows is how little the headline return tells you about a Hacksaw game. Both titles advertise about 96.3%, and both can legitimately be run at 88.3%. So the number in a game list is the studio's best case, not the operator's choice, and the gap between them — about eight points in both games — is larger than the entire spread between the best and worst RTP in the rest of this catalogue, which runs from 98% down to 95.97%. The build question matters more than every other difference between the games on this site put together.

On the game itself, the published specification is thin. Hacksaw rates volatility 5 of 5 on its own scale, which is a label rather than a measurement: there is no index to set against the 66.85 of Tombstone R.I.P. or the 2.7 of Blood Suckers, and no way to tell whether this game's maximum rating means the same thing as the sequel's. There is no hit frequency, no base-game or bonus split, no odds on the 10,000x or on anything else. Nineteen paylines and three certified builds is close to the whole of it.

It is as instructive to list what did not change between the two games. The payline count is 19 in both. The volatility rating is 5 of 5 in both. The flagship return is the same to within three hundredths of a point, and the floor build is the same to within twelve hundredths. So the sequel is the same machine, laid out the same way, rated the same by its own studio, at the same price — with a doubled ceiling and one extra build for operators. Whatever else a sequel might have changed, the published specification says it changed the top prize and the pricing options, and nothing else that can be measured.

That thinness is worth comparing with what Nolimit City publishes for an equivalent game. For Das xBoot: base 59.74%, bonus 36.29%, hit frequency 22.17%, a 100x win once in 635 spins, the bonus once in 211, the maximum once in 64,000,000. Six figures against two. Both studios make extreme games; only one of them tells you what extreme means for this particular title.

There is one more thing the three-build table tells you, and it is about the studio rather than the game. Across its four titles here, Hacksaw's floor builds are 88.4%, 88.36%, 88.42% and 88.28% — a range of fourteen hundredths of a point. A floor that consistent across four separate games is not four independent decisions; it is a product line, priced deliberately, with roughly eight points of return as the discount on offer to an operator. Knowing that, the question "which build does my casino run?" stops being a quirk of one game and becomes the single most important thing about this studio's entire range.

The practical advice is the same as for every Hacksaw game on this site and it takes fifteen seconds: open the game information panel and read the RTP before you spin. If it says 96.3% you are playing the game as advertised. If it says 88.4% you are playing a version that costs three times as much per spin, and the only difference is a setting the operator chose.

The summary: the original of a pair, with half the sequel's ceiling, a near-identical return, one fewer price point, and the same near-total silence on how it actually behaves. Between the two games, the ceiling is the difference the studio advertises and the build table is the difference that will decide what your session costs.

The RTP you get depends on the casino

Hacksaw certifies this game in 3 different RTP builds and each casino chooses which one to run. Most review sites print a single number; these are all the builds the studio publishes for Chaos Crew, highest first. The figure at the top of this page is the studio default, marked below.

On £100 of turnover the gap between the highest and lowest build here is £7.90. A casino is not obliged to tell you which build it runs, so treat any single RTP figure — including ours — as the studio default until you have checked the game's own info screen in the lobby.

How Chaos Crew compares with the rest of our catalogue

Against every other game here whose studio publishes its maths.

Volatility as the studio states it — what the index measures.