Wanted Dead or a Wild

What these figures mean for Wanted Dead or a Wild

At 96.38% this is the highest-returning Hacksaw game in this catalogue. It beats Le Bandit by four hundredths of a point, Chaos Crew by eight hundredths, and Chaos Crew 2 by eleven. Those margins are meaningless, and the reason they are meaningless is the most useful thing on this page.

All four Hacksaw titles here ship in multiple certified RTP builds, and the floors are 88.42% for this game, 88.36% for Le Bandit, 88.4% for Chaos Crew and 88.28% for Chaos Crew 2. So the difference between the best and worst build of this single game is 7.96 percentage points, while the difference between the flagship builds of the four games is eleven hundredths of a point. The spread inside one game is seventy times the spread between the games. Choosing a Hacksaw title by its advertised RTP is therefore pointless: which casino you play it at matters roughly seventy times more than which of the four you pick.

In money, at £1 a spin: the 96.38% build keeps 3.62p, the 88.42% build keeps 11.58p. Over a thousand spins that is £36.20 against £115.80 — a difference of nearly £80 on the same game with the same symbols, the same 12,500x ceiling and the same 15 paylines. The only thing that changed is a configuration setting, and nothing on the casino's pages is obliged to tell you which one is live. The game information panel inside the game is where the figure is normally stated, and reading it takes fifteen seconds.

On what the game does, Hacksaw publishes very little. Volatility is rated 4 of 5 on the studio's own scale, one notch below the 5 of 5 of both Chaos Crew titles and one above Le Bandit's 3 of 5. Those ratings are labels, not measurements: there is no index to compare with the 19.08 of Misery Mining or the 9.9 of Dead or Alive 2, and no way to know whether a 4 here means the same as a 4 would in another studio's hands — or indeed whether the scale is linear. Hit frequency, base-game and bonus split, odds of a 100x, odds of the 12,500x: none of it is published.

One figure on this page genuinely means nothing, and it is the 15 paylines. A line count is simply the number of patterns the game checks; it does not create money, and the return is fixed by how often symbols land rather than by how many ways they can be read. Twin Spin, elsewhere in this catalogue, checks 243 patterns and returns 96.55%; this game checks 15 and returns 96.38% at its flagship build. The difference between those two returns has nothing to do with the sixteen-fold difference in line count. Where a line count does matter is the minimum stake, since a game paying across many lines generally needs a spin large enough to cover them — which is an argument in favour of a 15-line game for a small balance, not against it.

The 12,500x ceiling sits in the middle of this studio's range here — above the 10,000x of Chaos Crew and Le Bandit, below the 20,000x of Chaos Crew 2 — and in the absence of odds there is nothing to say about how reachable it is. Nolimit City, for every one of its nine games on this site, states the probability of the maximum: once in 2,350,000 spins for Fire in the Hole xBomb at 60,000x, once in 130,000,000 for Tombstone R.I.P. at 300,000x. A 12,500x with no odds attached is a number that cannot be evaluated, and we are not going to estimate it from the games that do publish.

What is left is a game with the best flagship return of its studio's four titles here, a mid-range ceiling, a volatility label that cannot be compared with anything, and a build table that makes all of it secondary. If you are choosing between the Hacksaw games, the honest ranking is that they are indistinguishable on published return, and the one that matters is whichever one your casino runs at 96% rather than 88%.

To put the £80 figure in a longer frame: a player spinning £1 a thousand times a week on the floor build rather than the flagship gives up around £4,100 over a year of that habit. The game is identical throughout. No feature, no ceiling and no symbol changes — only the configuration, and nothing in the lobby is required to draw your attention to it. That is the strongest practical argument on this site for checking a figure that takes fifteen seconds to find, and it applies to all four Hacksaw titles here rather than this one alone.

The summary: the arithmetic above is the whole of the advice. Eleven hundredths of a point separate these four games at their best; eight points separate this game from itself at its worst. Check the panel, then play whichever you prefer.

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 Wanted Dead or a Wild, 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 £7.96. 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 Wanted Dead or a Wild 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.