Le Bandit Slot

Le Bandit is about a raccoon. He is called Smokey, he works the streets of
Paris with a crowbar, and he has no discernible remorse about any of it. That
this is the premise of a Hacksaw Gaming release will surprise nobody who has met
the studio before.

What might surprise you is how gentle it is. Hacksaw rate the volatility at
3 out of 5 on their own scale, and their scale is not a forgiving one. By their
standards this is the sunny one.

A cluster grid that keeps its receipts

Six reels and five rows, so it is one of the larger six reel slots rather
than a classic five. Wins are clusters, not lines: five or more matching symbols
touching each other pay out, disappear, and let new symbols fall into the space
they leave.

Hacksaw call that Super Cascades. It is tumbling, and tumbling is not new.
What is new is what the tumble leaves behind on the grid.

Golden Squares are the whole game

Every position that took part in a win turns gold and stays gold. On its own
that does nothing at all. Then a Rainbow symbol lands, and every gold square on
the board opens at once.

Out come coins. Bronze coins are pocket change, silver coins are respectable,
gold coins reach 500x, and mixed in among them are four leaf clovers that
multiply the cells beside them and Pots of Gold that swallow every coin value on
screen and hold the running total.

The reason this works is that you can watch it loading. Gold spreads across
the grid during ordinary spins, so by the time the Rainbow finally shows up you
already know roughly whether it is going to matter. Very few games let you see
the shape of an outcome before it happens.

Three ways into the free spins

The scatter count decides which round you get, and the difference between
them is real rather than cosmetic. Three scatters gives you Luck of the Bandit
and eight spins, with the Golden Squares carrying over between spins until a
Rainbow cashes them.

Four scatters gives you All That Glitters Is Gold, twelve spins, and squares
that stay lit even after they have already paid. Five scatters gives you Treasure
at the End of the Rainbow, twelve spins with a Rainbow guaranteed on every single
one, which is the version everybody is actually after.

Maximum win is 10,000x your stake. That is a serious ceiling, and it belongs
almost entirely to the third of those rounds.

RTP, and one thing you will not find in a British lobby

Hacksaw ship Le Bandit at 96.34% as the standard build, with 94.23%, 92.17%
and 88.36% versions available for operators to run instead. That bottom figure
is not a typo, and nothing on the screen announces which one you are playing.
Open the game information panel before you spin.

You will also read elsewhere about a feature buy menu. Feature buys are not
permitted at casinos licensed for the British market, so at any of the
UK online casinos worth using, that menu is simply absent and the
bonus round has to arrive the old fashioned way.

Worth your time?

Le Bandit is the Hacksaw game you can hand to somebody who found the rest of
the catalogue too brutal. The base game genuinely pays, the cascade keeps
something happening, and the gold accumulating in the background gives an
ordinary spin a reason to be interesting.

It is still a Hacksaw slot, which means the 10,000x is a very long way away
and the sensible plan is a stake you can afford to lose repeatedly. But of the
studio’s output, this is the one that behaves most like entertainment and least
like a stress test.

18+. Gambling should be entertainment, not income. Long term the
house wins. Free and confidential help is at BeGambleAware.org.