Hacksaw Gaming
slots

Hacksaw Gaming has been making slots since 2018 and works out of Malta. It holds a UK Gambling Commission licence, which is what allows its games to appear on sites regulated for British players.

On our data source the catalogue runs to 268 games, of which 176 carry a dated release. That puts it 13th for size among the 80 studios we track, so this is a substantial library rather than a boutique one.

The dated releases break down by year like this:

• 2021: 5 titles
• 2022: 26 titles
• 2023: 27 titles
• 2024: 11 titles
• 2025: 43 titles
• 2026: 40 titles
• Plus 24 entries that carry a 1970 placeholder date rather than a real one

The shape of that run tells you more than any single year does. Output climbed through 2022 and 2023, dropped to 11 dated titles in 2024, then jumped to 43 in 2025 and is already at 40 for 2026, with the newest date on file at 2026-12-08. In practice that means the catalogue turns over quickly and new Hacksaw games land in front of you often.

The theming is unusually concentrated. Halloween is attached to 21 titles and Horror to another 13, well ahead of Fantasy (8), Animal (8), Wild West (8) and Fish (7). If the horror end of slot art is not for you, a sizeable slice of this catalogue will not be either.

Across the 47 Hacksaw titles that publish an RTP on our data source, the median is 94.25% and the average is 93.77%. The studios we track average about 95.7%, so both of those figures sit below the field.

Return to player is a theoretical figure measured over an enormous number of spins, not a forecast for your afternoon. What it does set is the long-run edge. A game returning 93.77% in theory gives back less per £100 staked than one returning about 95.7%, and the longer you play, the more reliably that difference shows up in your balance.

The average sitting below the median is a signal in itself. It means a tail of weaker-returning titles is pulling the mean down rather than the whole catalogue being uniformly low, so there are better numbers in here if you go looking for them.

The published range runs from 82.25% at the bottom to 96.36% at the top. That is a wide spread, which makes checking the figure on the specific game in front of you far more worthwhile here than at a studio whose titles all cluster within a point of each other.

That check matters for a second reason. Many slots ship in more than one RTP version and the operator picks which one to run, so the same title can pay differently on two sites. The number in the game's own info panel, on the site you are actually playing, is the only one that counts.

On volatility, 92 Hacksaw titles carry a rating on the 1 to 5 ladder. 47 are Very high, 35 are Medium and 10 are High. Not one is rated Low or Low to medium.

A very high volatility slot pays rarely and unevenly by design. Expect long dry stretches where the balance drains with little to show for it, broken up by occasional larger hits that do most of the work. With this studio that is the default experience rather than the exception.

The practical consequence is stake size and session length. On a very high variance game the same bankroll empties faster and swings harder than it would on a medium one, so smaller stakes buy you more spins and a fairer sample of how the game actually behaves. The 35 medium-rated titles are the steadier corner of the catalogue if you want something less punishing.

We only track a small number of Hacksaw releases directly, and the mechanic recorded in them is Cluster Pays, used in Le Prechaun. That is a slice of the catalogue rather than a summary of it.

Cluster pays games drop the payline idea entirely. Instead of matching symbols from left to right along fixed lines, you are paid for groups of matching symbols that touch each other on the grid, normally with a minimum group size before anything pays at all. Wins can form anywhere on the grid, which makes it read very differently from a five-reel line game.

One thing you will not see on a site licensed for Great Britain is a feature buy. Buying straight into a bonus round is not permitted here, so every feature has to be reached through ordinary play. That is worth knowing on a catalogue that leans this heavily towards very high volatility, because the features are usually where the larger outcomes live.

The highest published RTPs on our data source sit in a tight band at the top of the catalogue. Life and Death leads at 96.36%, with Le Bandit at 96.34% and Le Viking at 96.32% close behind.

Below those, three titles share 96.31%: FRKN Bananas, Get the Cheese and Rise of Ymir. Fighter Pit at 96.3% and Phoenix DuelReels at 96.27% complete the top eight.

The useful part is the gap between that group and everything else. Each of these sits well above the catalogue median of 94.25%, which tells you the better-returning Hacksaw games are a distinct band you have to seek out, not the general standard across 268 titles.

The releases we track and can link to ourselves are newer and far fewer: Epic Ze Zeus, released on 2026-07-28, and Le Prechaun from 2026-07-16, which publishes a 96.28% RTP and uses Cluster Pays.

Two games against a catalogue of 268 is a thin slice, and we would rather say so plainly. The reviews grow as the desk plays new releases, while the catalogue statistics above come from the wider data source rather than from our own play.

Set against the 80 studios we track, three comparisons stand out:

• Size: 268 games ranks 13th of the 80 studios we track, so the library is bigger than most.
• RTP: an average of 93.77% against a field average of about 95.7%, which puts it below par on published returns.
• Volatility: 21 of the 53 studios we hold a lean for also skew Very high, so a high-variance catalogue is common rather than distinctive.

Put together, what separates Hacksaw from the field is scale and release pace rather than generosity. Plenty of the studios we track build very high variance games, so the swings are not the differentiator; the published returns sitting below the field average is the thing worth knowing before you stake anything.

Where the studio does have a clear character is theming. A catalogue with 21 Halloween titles and 13 horror ones is a deliberate identity, and it is easier to recognise a Hacksaw game by its look than by its maths.

The sensible way to meet any Hacksaw game is the free demo first. A demo runs the real game with the real maths and the real features on play money, so you can see how the grid behaves, how often features arrive and whether the pace suits you, without staking a penny.

What a demo cannot show you is how the game feels with your own money across a real session. That gap is at its widest on a studio like this one, where Very high is the most common volatility rating: a long dry stretch on a play-money balance costs you nothing and barely registers, while the identical stretch with your own funds is a different experience entirely. Demos here are for over-18s only, in line with GB rules.

Modern slots are built mobile-first and scaled up to desktop rather than the other way round, so a phone screen is the design target rather than an afterthought. Portrait layouts, larger tap targets and readable paytables are the norm.

The demos run straight in the browser, so there is nothing to install. The GB rules travel with the game build rather than the device: the 2.5-second minimum spin time, no autoplay and the stake caps apply on a phone exactly as they do on a desktop, because they are tied to the UK version of the game.

The catalogue statistics on this page come from the Hacksaw games listed on our data source, and each figure is computed only from the titles that actually publish it. That is why the sample sizes differ: 268 games in the catalogue, 176 with a dated release, 47 with a published RTP and 92 with a volatility rating. Where a figure is missing we leave it out rather than estimating it.

The reviews are a separate thing. Those come from the individual releases the desk plays, which is a small and recent slice of what this studio has made, and we do not claim to have played the whole catalogue. When the underlying data changes, whether that is a new release landing or a figure being published that was previously withheld, we update the number here rather than leaving a stale one in place.