About Wanted Dead or a Wild
Released on 29 September 2021, Wanted Dead or a Wild is the game that made Hacksaw Gaming a household name outside its own niche. The layout is unusually plain for a studio known for gimmicks: five reels, five rows, 15 fixed paylines, wins paying left to right. Everything distinctive happens on top of that grid, not inside it.
The numbers first. Default RTP is 96.38%, volatility is rated 4 out of 5 on Hacksaw's own scale, the maximum win is 12,500x your stake and the hit rate is roughly 19% — fewer than one spin in five returns anything at all. Bets run from €0.20 to €100. The RTP figure needs the same caution you would give a Pragmatic title: Hacksaw certifies four builds — 96.38%, 94.55%, 92.33% and 88.42% — and the operator chooses. Eight points of spread on the same reels is enormous, and on a game this volatile you will never feel the difference in a session; you only pay for it. The active setting is printed in the game's information panel.
The base paytable is thin by design. The revolver cylinder tops it at 2x, 10x or 20x your stake for three, four or five, the whiskey bottle and the moneybag pay 1x to 10x, the bandit and the skull 0.5x to 5x, and the card royals from 10 to Ace barely register at 0.1x to 1x. Nothing there sustains a session, and that is the point: the value sits in the DuelReels mechanic. A VS symbol landing in a win expands to cover its entire reel as a wild, then a duel plays out and awards it a random multiplier between x2 and x100. When several VS reels take part in the same win, their multipliers combine.
Where the game separates itself is the bonuses — there are three of them, with three different scatters, and they are genuinely different games. The Great Train Robbery gives 10 free spins in which every wild becomes sticky and stays on the grid for the rest of the round. Duel at Dawn gives 10 free spins with a much higher rate of VS multiplier reels than the base game. Dead Man's Hand is not a free spins round at all: a collect phase uses respins to accumulate wild positions and multiplier values, then a short showdown phase of three spins fires everything you banked. All three can reach the full 12,500x.
Each bonus can be bought directly: 80x for The Great Train Robbery, 200x for Duel at Dawn and 400x for Dead Man's Hand, with published buy RTPs of 96.27%, 96.33% and 96.43% respectively. Natural triggers exist but are rare, which is why most players who reach these rounds pay for them. Bonus buys are unavailable in several regulated markets.
