Beam Boys

Beam Boys Review

Everything in Beam Boys is gray. The alley is gray, the concrete reels are gray, the barbed wire around the grid is gray, and the cat sitting beside it, half fur and half machinery with a glowing socket where one eye should be, is gray. The symbols are what the cat has been doing with its afternoon: a rabbit with crosses for eyes, a fish, a bird on its back with its legs in the air. The only color in the place comes from one thing, a big round button on a box marked Danger, and the button is the game.

Press it and the alley floods orange. The cat’s eye lights up, the wire glows, and the word under the button changes from Normal to Extreme. Press it again and everything cools back to blue. Hacksaw Gaming built a whole slot around that switch and parked it in the same monochrome back alley as RIP City, one street over and a year later.

We like the switch, and we like it for the right reason. It is a real choice handed to the player: chase the biggest, swingiest version of the bonus, or play the steadier game and stay in the session longer. Normal wins smaller and more often, around 36% of spins. Extreme wins bigger and less often, around 33%. The 12,500x ceiling is the same either way, and the returns sit within a tenth of a point of each other, so nothing about the switch is a value decision. It is a mood decision, and the game recolors itself to match.

What the switch sits on top of is the cleanest math in the Hacksaw catalog. Six reels, four rows, 4,096 ways, no multipliers, no coins, no collect symbols. Every win is a number of ways multiplied by a symbol value, and the only special thing that ever happens is a cat firing a laser across its row and turning everything to its left wild. That is the whole mechanic. This review is mostly about what a row of wilds is worth, why rows compound, and why the 12,500x on the box cannot happen on a single spin.

Six reels and four rows with ways wins, so matching symbols pay on adjacent reels from left to right and every combination of positions counts separately, 4,096 of them at most. Stakes run from $0.10 to $100. The published return is 96.35% in Normal and 96.26% in Extreme, from ten billion simulated rounds, with 94.24%, 92.30%, and 88.25% models also in circulation.

The paytable is flat even by Hacksaw standards. The five royals pay 0.5x your bet for six of a kind, the two gray carcasses 0.8x, the fish and the rabbit 1.2x, and the lizard 2x at the top. Six of anything for under 1x tells you the game pays for ways, not symbols, and the Wild Laser Cat is the only thing that makes ways: it lands on reels 2 to 6, beams left across its row, and every position it covers becomes wild. Three to six FS scatters open the bonus with 5, 10, 20, or 40 spins. The max win is 12,500x, and the round ends the instant it is reached.

How To Play

• Set your stake between $0.10 and $100, then set the switch. Normal is blue and plays steadier; Extreme is orange and plays for the bigger, rarer round. Neither is the better value.
• Wins pay left to right on adjacent reels, from three of a kind up to six.
• A Wild Laser Cat lands on reels 2 to 6 and beams left across its row. Everything from reel 1 up to the cat becomes wild. The further right it lands, the longer the wild row.
• Three, four, five or six scatters award 5, 10, 20 or 40 free spins. During the round, two scatters add two spins and three add four.
• If you use FeatureSpins, decide on the switch first. Changing volatility while FeatureSpins are active disables them immediately.
• Check the RTP on the info screen before you start. The top models are 96.35% and 96.26%; the 88.25% version is eight points worse, and US operators may run their own.

Bonus Features

What a row of wilds is worth

Ways games pay by multiplying the count of matching symbols on each reel. One match per reel is one way; two on every reel is 64. A wild counts as a match for every symbol, so a full wild row adds one to the count on every reel at once, and that is why rows compound. One row turns every symbol on the board into part of a six reel way and is worth, on a board with symbols spread evenly, somewhere around 30 to 40x. Two rows are worth roughly 550x, because now every reel has two guaranteed matches and the products multiply. Three rows are roughly 2,800x. Four rows is the whole board wild: 4,096 ways of six wilds at the top pay of 2x, which is 8,192x, and that is the most any single spin in this game can pay.

The first three figures are approximations, because the real reels are not evenly weighted. The shape is not. One row to two multiplies the win by something like fifteen; two to three by about five; three to four by three. The second row is worth far more than the first, so the spins that matter are the ones where two cats land on the right side of the board together.

Where the cat lands decides everything

The beam travels left, so a cat’s value is its reel number. A cat on reel 6 makes a full row of six wilds. A cat on reel 2 makes two, reels 1 and 2, and leaves the four positions to its right untouched. A row that is wild only on the left still helps, because ways pay from the left and two guaranteed matches make everything on reels 3 to 6 easier to chain, but it is a fraction of the same cat from reel 6. This is the thing to watch on every spin, and it is the exact difference between the two FeatureSpins products, which is why one costs four times the other.

The 12,500x can only be a total

The rules say the max win can be reached in all game modes, meaning Normal and Extreme, and that is true. It is also true that no single spin can reach it, because the board saturates at 8,192x. The cap is a free spins total: a round that accumulates past 12,500x is cut short there and any remaining spins are discarded. The 40 spin bonus is the only realistic route to it. In the base game the ceiling is a full wild board at 8,192x, and you would be among the luckiest players in the game’s history to see one.

The bonus round

Three, four, five or six scatters award 5, 10, 20 or 40 free spins with a better chance of landing Wild Laser Cats. That is the full description in the rules. No reel activates, no row locks, no symbol is promoted. Two scatters during the round add two spins, three add four, with no cap stated. It is the base game with more cats, and its quality is decided by how many of them land on reels 5 and 6 together.

The switch, and what it does to the buy menu

The switch carries into the buy menu. Buy any product on Extreme and you get the Extreme version of it: fewer paying spins, bigger ones when they come, the best shot at the top of the range. Buy it on Normal and you get the steadier version of the same round. The buy cards say so directly: all four read Medium with the switch on Normal and Extreme with it on Extreme, because on this game the label is the switch, not a rating of the product. Each product has a published return for each setting; the eight figures span 96.30% to 96.40% and should play no part in the decision. Pick the switch for the session you want, then the product. For the swing, Extreme plus Narrow Spectrum is the sharpest tool on the menu. To watch the mechanic work without the dead stretches, Normal plus Wide Spectrum is the gentle version of the same idea.

The buy menu

• BonusHunt FeatureSpins, 5x. Each spin is ten times more likely to trigger the bonus.
• Wide Spectrum FeatureSpins, 50x. At least one Wild Laser Cat guaranteed on reels 2 to 6.
• Narrow Spectrum FeatureSpins, 200x. At least one Wild Laser Cat guaranteed on reels 4 to 6.
• Photonic Fur Bonus, 110x. The free spins round, entered with 10, 20 or 40 spins.

The gap between Wide Spectrum and Narrow Spectrum is the whole game in two prices. Wide guarantees a cat somewhere on reels 2 to 6, and a cat on reel 2 is two wilds. Narrow guarantees reels 4 to 6, so the shortest beam you can be dealt is four wilds and the longest is the full row. You are paying four times the price for a floor, not a ceiling, and given how much a row is worth once it is long, the floor is where the value sits. Photonic Fur is harder to judge. At 110x it costs what many Hacksaw ten spin rounds cost, but it hands you 10, 20 or 40 spins by a rule the game does not publish. The 40 spin version is the only route to the cap; the 10 spin version is a lot to pay for double what three scatters give you free. Until the split is published, treat it as a variable product at a fixed price.

If you are coming from RIP City, the resemblance is deliberate and the difference is geometry. RIP City’s cats expand down a reel and need a wild underneath to matter. Beam Boys’ cats expand across a row and need nothing else, because there are no multipliers to chase. It is the simpler game, and on Normal the far gentler one. For wild reels with multipliers attached, Stormforged is the Hacksaw title to look at.