New Slots Round Up: 25th July – 31st July 2026

This week’s round up is going to be a bit of a strange one, seeing as we only have 2 new slots, both from Hacksaw, and one of them is simply a reskin! After weeks and weeks of crammed release slates, it’s certainly a change of pace.

So I’ll be covering Le Bruno only in this section, and there’s not even a great deal to say here because it’s a reskin of the original Le Bandit, but with RTP reduced from 96.34% to 94.39% and the max win reduced from a healthy 10,000x to a measly 2,500x. If you see this at a sweeps casino, I’d steer clear. I had a few spins on it and it felt like the Rainbows (the special symbols that trigger the big wins) were harder to come by – that makes sense with the lower RTP.

The skin seems to be some kind of orange-tinted, African explorer vibe, but some of the original animations from Le Bandit – like Smokey saying “Le pain” – have remained, so even this reskin feels low effort. Yes, Le Bandit is still one of my favorite ever slots, and I’m sure that’s true for many other players, but its reputation and value seems to be cheapened with every new version. With well over 10 Le slots in total now, it seems to be the next Big Bass. I’m sure it makes Hacksaw and the casinos a lot of money, but the real slots fans are slowly losing patience with the series.

While we’re on the subject (and while there isn’t much else to talk about this week), it’s worth looking at why this might be happening, because it feels like part of a bigger trend with companies like Hacksaw and Nolimit City.

It’s fair to say both of these studios had their time as the industry’s disruptors, releasing fresh ideas that changed what modern slots could be, and the fans absolutely loved it. Over the past few years, though, both have gone through major changes at a business level.

Nolimit City became part of Evolution in 2022, ending its run as an independent studio. Hacksaw, meanwhile, went public last year and reorganised its leadership structure ahead of its IPO, and this marked the change from a founder-led disruptor to a publicly listed company. Co-founder Marcus Cordes appears to have stayed on, but the direction of the studio’s output has shifted.

The IPO itself was a success for Hacksaw, valuing the company at around SEK 22 billion (approximately $2.3 billion) while bringing new expectations around growth and shareholder value. And since then, much like Nolimit City, Hacksaw appears to have become much more focused on expanding popular series and reusing reliable mechanics/themes rather than taking the kinds of creative risks that built its reputation in the first place. There’s also more of a focus on pushing players towards bonus buys rather than letting games play out organically – these buys can quickly boost player spend.

It’s sad, but every company has its golden years, and eventually the direction changes and it’s more about delivering profit than innovating. At least this creates room for other slots studios to shine, and I’ve been really impressed with the outputs of Relax, Print, and Peter & Sons lately. And Hacksaw does come out with the occasional fresh banger now and then, so we definitely won’t write the studio off completely, but the frequency seems to have dropped.

Anyway, let’s get onto our Game of the Week, as much as it pains me to place a ‘3 pot’ slot in this position.

Game of the Week

2 things that are overdone in slots are the Mexican aesthetic and ‘3 pot’ games – we literally had this combination last week in the form of 3 Chili Charms! But Hacksaw has decided to bring the same 2 ideas together with Tres Pinatas. As for stats, this is a medium volatility game with an RTP of 96.26% (not too bad) and a max win of 2,500x (bad).

Hacksaw has already experimented with this formula earlier this year with 3 Cursed Chests. It was similarly medium volatility and had the same low max win, although it did have a few more paylines. Tres Pinatas works on 9 paylines and has 4 jackpots available. To be honest, the main thing going for it is that the 3 effects here are not completely standard.

So Blue (‘Double’), Red (‘Multi’), and Green (‘Collect’) Skulls are located at the top of the grid, and the Piñata symbols of the same colors can trigger each Skull and its associated Hold & Win round. The operative word being “can”. I think this is one of my biggest bugbears with these games – I personally prefer it when something landing on the grid has a definite outcome rather than a ‘maybe’ feel.

What’s worse is that if the Piñatas don’t trigger the round – which they usually won’t – an animation is added to the Skull to make it seem as if something is building up. But Hacksaw’s own rules say: “The animation does not influence the activation of the 3 Skulls of the 3 Piñatas.”

When a Piñata does eventually trigger the bonus round, they stay sticky on the grid and you enter a Hold & Win feature:

• The Blue Piñata multiplies 1 Coin value by 2x every time the Hold & Win lives are refilled.
• The Green Piñata collects all Coin and Jackpot values after the 3 lives run out for the first time.
• The Red Piñata multiplies Coin values and Green Piñata symbols in a 3 x 3 area at the end of the round.

Of course, the colors can combine, and this can lead to bigger wins from the interactions.

As I said above, the 3 effects are a little different to what we usually see in these games, so I will give Hacksaw credit for that. In that sense, if you are going to play a game of this type, I’d recommend Tres Pinatas over the majority of others. But the whole thing really hinges on whether you actually like this format.

There are so many of these games now, and unlike Megaways, for example, which felt like a foundational new mechanic that could be adapted more often, this format feels much more limited and probably shouldn’t have been iterated on quite so many times – at least without innovation. The base games in particular in these games can fall flat.

To sum up, this is one of the better 3 pot games, but it’s still only Game of the Week in the absence of anything else.

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