Buried By Night
A Wild West duel slot where the VS symbol expands into DuelRows with multipliers up to 100x, and they add up when they stack. I finished almost break even, with a 60x base game hit and a 394.1x win in the super bonus. Western games are my sweet spot, and this one delivered. APPROVED!
Hacksaw · Stake 0.10 · 1,000 fixed spins · RTP 96.32%
Day 46 - Buried by Night - Slot Review
On day 46, I took on Buried by Night by Hacksaw Gaming, a 5x4 slot with 14 paylines, 96.32% RTP and a max win of 15,000x, released today.
It’s a Wild West slot about an outlaw who has to face what he’s been running from, with a duel at dawn and a final reckoning by night. The symbols are the usual western stuff: a sheriff’s badge, crossed revolvers, a cowboy hat, a ram skull and a wagon wheel, plus the four card suits for the low end. Wins are matching symbols on adjacent reels along a payline, starting from the leftmost reel, and the Wild substitutes for all the paying symbols.
The core of the game is the DuelRows. The VS symbol can only land on reels 2, 3 and 4, and when it lands, it expands sideways along its row: a VS on reel 2 covers reels 1 to 3, a VS on reel 3 covers all 5 reels, and a VS on reel 4 covers reels 3 to 5. If the expanded row is part of a winning combination, it turns into a DuelRow, which counts as a Wild row. Then a Duel starts between two duelists on the row, and each one has a multiplier. The multiplier of the surviving duelist gets applied across the entire DuelRow, so it multiplies every win connected to it. The possible multipliers are 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 10x, 25x, 50x and 100x. If more than one DuelRow is part of the same winning combination, their multipliers are added together before they’re applied to the win. DuelRows can’t overlap each other.
The bonuses come from the FS scatters, which have to land at the same time:
3 FS scatters trigger the Trigger Warning bonus with 10 free spins. It plays like the base game, but with a higher chance of landing VS symbols. Extra FS symbols during the bonus award extra free spins: 2 give +2 and 3 give +4. 4 FS scatters trigger the Shoot to Kill bonus (the super bonus) with 8 free spins. It also plays like the base game, but a DuelSpin Bar fills up outside the grid, and every FS symbol that lands fills one step of it. Every 3 steps raise the bar by one tier, and each tier awards a DuelSpin with more guaranteed VS symbols and more Nudges, from at least 1 VS and 3 Nudges at tier one up to at least 4 VS and 6 Nudges at tier four. Every tier also gives 2 free spins. A Nudge moves all the reels down by one row, and the wins are paid after each Nudge. DuelSpins don’t count toward your free spins. 3 Hot 100 scatters trigger the Six Feet Under bonus with 1 free spin, where Nudges keep going until 100 wins have been awarded. The wins are counted in the Hot 100 Meter outside the grid.
FS and Hot 100 symbols can’t be on the grid at the same time.
Plan for winning: you want the VS symbols to expand into winning combinations, ideally more than one DuelRow in the same win, so the duel multipliers add together, and in the super bonus you want to fill the DuelSpin Bar and climb the tiers.
My session was a small win, almost a break even, with a profit of $0.18. I got a 60x win in the base game. I triggered 3 regular bonuses with 3 scatters and 1 super bonus with 4 scatters, and the best multiplier of the day was 394.1x in the super bonus, which was the highlight of the session. The Hot 100 bonus never triggered.
Overall I quite liked the game. I saw most of the core mechanics and bonus rounds in a 1,000 spin session, which is what this project is all about. Western games are my sweet spot, so the theme and Hacksaw combination had a head start, and the game delivered. 1000 Spins APPROVED!