Chaos Crew 2

What these figures mean for Chaos Crew 2

Chaos Crew 2 does not have one return percentage. Hacksaw certifies four: 96.27%, 94.22%, 92.41% and 88.28%. The casino chooses which of them to run, you are not told which one you are playing unless you go looking in the game information panel, and the gap between the best and the worst is 7.99 percentage points. That is the single most important fact about this game, and it is not the number printed in anybody's game list.

Put it in money. At £1 a spin, a 96.27% build gives back, on average, 96.27p and keeps 3.73p. The 88.28% build keeps 11.72p — more than three times as much per spin. Over a thousand spins, which is an ordinary evening for someone playing quickly, that is a difference of around £80 in expected cost: roughly £37 against roughly £117. The game looks identical in both cases. The symbols, the features, the maximum win and the advertised volatility are the same. Only the rate at which it takes your money differs, and it differs by a factor of three.

This is not a Hacksaw peculiarity — Play'n GO certifies six builds for Book of Dead, from 96.25% down to 84.25% — but Hacksaw is unusually consistent about it, and three other games from this studio on this site carry the same four-build structure: Chaos Crew runs 96.3 / 92.4 / 88.4, Le Bandit 96.34 / 94.23 / 92.17 / 88.36, and Wanted Dead or a Wild 96.38 / 94.55 / 92.33 / 88.42. The pattern is a flagship figure near 96.3%, a middle pair, and a floor around 88.3%. If you play this studio's games, the build question applies to all of them, and the floor is always about eight points down.

Here is what we cannot tell you, and it is the thing that would matter most: which build is live at which casino. Our catalogue has a column for exactly that — the RTP recorded for a game at a specific operator, with the date we checked it — and for this game it is empty, as it is for every game on this site. We have not opened a single operator's lobby and read the figure out of the game information panel. So the four numbers above are the studio's certified options; which of them you will actually be playing is unverified by us, and anybody who tells you a casino runs "the 96% version" without having looked at that panel is guessing.

What the builds do not change is the shape of the game, and that shape is extreme. The studio rates volatility 5 of 5 on its own scale — its maximum — and the ceiling is 20,000x, double the 10,000x of the original Chaos Crew and of Le Bandit. On a £1 spin that is a theoretical best outcome of £20,000. Hacksaw does not publish the odds of reaching it. That absence is worth naming, because other studios in this catalogue do: Nolimit City states that Tombstone R.I.P. pays its maximum once in 130,000,000 spins and that a 100x win arrives once in 1,014. For Chaos Crew 2 there is no published hit frequency, no odds on a 100x spin, and no probability for the 20,000x. We are not going to estimate any of them.

So the honest position on this game is a trade between what two studios disclose. Hacksaw tells you something nobody else does as clearly — that the return is a setting, not a property, and exactly which settings exist. Nolimit City tells you what you are statistically in for but publishes one return and no build options. Neither disclosure is complete, and the gap in the Hacksaw specification is the one that makes a session unpredictable in a way the player cannot reason about: a 5-of-5 volatility rating is a label the studio assigned, not an index you can compare with the 36.42 or 66.85 that the Nolimit games carry.

The practical advice that follows is short, because the data supports only a short version. Before you play a Hacksaw game, open the game information panel and find the RTP figure. That panel is where the live build is normally stated, and it is usually the only place a casino says which one it runs — the figure rarely appears anywhere on the operator's own pages. We have not audited how consistently operators show it, so treat this as where to look rather than as a guarantee that it will be there. If it reads 96.27%, you are on the certified flagship. If it reads 88.28%, the same game is costing you three times as much per spin, and the only thing that has changed is a number in a configuration file. That check takes fifteen seconds and is worth more than any review of this game, including this one.

The summary is unusual for a slot review, because the most useful sentence about this game is not about the game. A maximum-volatility release with a 20,000x ceiling and no published odds is a thing you cannot reason about: there is no figure here to tell you whether that ceiling is a once-in-a-lifetime event or a once-in-a-season one, and we will not invent one. What you can act on is the price. The same game is sold at four of them, the worst costs three times as much per spin as the best, and the fifteen seconds it takes to check which one you are on is the highest-value thing you will do in this game — and in every other Hacksaw title you open.

The RTP you get depends on the casino

Hacksaw certifies this game in 4 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 2, 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 £7.99. 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 2 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.