Le Cowboy

Le Cowboy Review

Hacksaw Gaming has a habit of putting the same raccoon in a different hat and calling it a new game, and this time they aren’t pretending otherwise. The info screen cheerfully announces that the Bandit has entered his Cowboy era, following Smokey’s stints as a pharaoh, a viking, and a Greek god. What it does not mention is that the machine underneath the hat has been rebuilt.

Six reels, five rows, and wins made of five or more matching symbols touching anywhere on the grid. Winners clear, fresh symbols drop, and it goes again. The new idea is what happens to a Wild that helps make a win: rather than disappearing, it draws a weapon and becomes a Revolver Cylinder loaded with two to six shots, and when the cascades run out, the cylinders open fire on random squares. Whatever they hit becomes a Coin, a Diamond, a Clover, a Loot Bag or a Reload. Then the round resolves in a strict order, and that order is where the money hides.

Two things before you saddle up. Loot Bags collect each other, which is how a game rated medium volatility gets away with a 25,000x ceiling. The other is a warning, not a tip: the best return here is free, and the worst one is a single misplaced click away.

Six reels and five rows with cluster pays, so a win is five or more matching symbols connected anywhere on the grid, and the Wild stands in for all of them. Winning symbols are removed, and new ones drop into the gaps, which continues while fresh clusters keep forming. Stakes run from $0.05 to $40, and the published return is 96.28%, from ten billion simulated rounds, with 94.31%, 92.30%, and 86.33% builds also in circulation.

Volatility is rated three out of five, and the max win is 25,000x, available in every game mode, paid the moment a round reaches it, with anything remaining discarded. The paytable is generous by recent Hacksaw standards: all five card symbols pay identically at 50x for fourteen or more, the hat and cactus 75x, the revolvers and skull 100x, and the sheriff star 200x at the top.

How To Play

• Set your stake between $0.05 and $40. Wins are five or more matching symbols touching anywhere on the grid.
• Watch for a Wild inside a winning cluster. That is what becomes a Revolver Cylinder, and cylinders are the only way coins reach the grid.
• Cylinders fire after every cascade has finished, not during. More than one fires in order, top to bottom and left to right.
• Three FS scatters open High Noon Saloon, four open Trail of Trickery, five open Pistols at Dawn. All three award 10 free spins.
• The moment you trigger a round you get a choice of the round or a gamble. Be careful here: the gamble sits where you would tap to continue.
• Take the round. Every published figure says the gamble returns less, whichever way you got in.

Bonus Features

The order everything resolves in

This is the most sequenced round Hacksaw has built and the sequence is published, so it is worth following once. Cylinders fire. Any Reload re-arms them all, and more symbols appear. When no new Reload turns up, the Coins and Diamonds reveal their values. Then the Clovers apply their multipliers, Green to what they touch and Gold to the entire grid. Then the Loot Bags collect. Then the Clovers and Reloads vanish, every shot position fires again, and the whole thing repeats. Only at the end are all the Coins and Loot Bags added up and multiplied by your stake.

Two details in that order do all the work. The Gold Clover resolves before the bags, so it inflates the pot the bags are about to collect. And a Loot Bag collects every bag that activated before it, which means bags do not add; they double. One bag takes the grid total. The second takes the grid total plus the first. The third takes both of those as well. Four bags turn a round into sixteen times itself, and behind a x20 Gold Clover, three bags on a 200x grid is already past the 25,000x ceiling. That is how a game rated three out of five for volatility carries a cap that size.

The gamble, and why the published cost understates it

The moment you trigger a round, you choose between playing it and gambling. The gamble fires a revolver at four outcomes in High Noon Saloon and eight in Trail of Trickery. One of them upgrades you to the round above, and from Trail of Trickery that means Pistols at Dawn, the one round the buy menu does not sell. The rest are cash prizes drawn from the same ladders as the coins, from 1x at the bottom to 500x at the very top.

Hacksaw publishes what that choice costs, and it is negative in every case:

• Won from the base game: 96.40% never gambling, 96.37% gambling once, 96.28% gambling twice.
• BonusHunt FeatureSpins: 96.24%, 96.15%, 96.06%.
• High Noon Saloon bought: 96.33%, 96.20%, 96.10%.
• Trail of Trickery bought: 96.33% never gambling, 96.20% gambling once.

Every row falls. Gambling once costs between three and thirteen hundredths of a point, twice costs up to 0.23, and it costs more when you bought your way in than when you earned it. The spread from the best line in the game to the worst is 0.34 of a point, which is wider than most complete buy menus, and none of it depends on which product you choose. It depends on two clicks.

One of those clicks looks like it has something behind it. The gamble on a Trail of Trickery trigger is shooting at Pistols at Dawn, and Pistols at Dawn is not on the buy menu, so this is the only route into it short of five scatters. Look closely at what that offer actually is. Seven of the eight outcomes on that revolver are cash prizes rather than rounds, drawn from a ladder that starts at 1x, and the game publishes what the gamble costs in return while telling you nothing about your chances of the eighth. You are putting a round you have already won, or already paid 250x for, on an unstated shot at the round above it.

The published figures hide how wide that swing is. A fall from 96.33% to 96.20% reads like almost nothing, and as a long-run average it is almost nothing. But an average can sit still while the spread underneath it opens right up. Losing 0.13 of a point is the arithmetic. Handing back a round you already hold for one shot at a better one is the experience, and after a 250x purchase that is a serious bet placed with money that is already gone.

Which brings the real warning. The choice arrives as two buttons sitting side by side directly beneath the line telling you how many free spins you just won, continue on the left and gamble on the right. That is the exact part of the screen you would press to move things along, and it appears at the moment you are least likely to be reading carefully. Anyone who plays quickly, or who has just been tapping through win presentations, is one careless press from the worst available option on a game that publishes exactly how bad it is. Slow down for one screen.

The Bullet Collector is the best idea in the game

Trail of Trickery is where the round stops being a series of spins and becomes one long wind-up. Every win you land adds a bullet to a counter outside the grid, and nothing is spent until the final spin, when the lot is fired in a single volley. It fires after the Cylinders and Reloads have finished with the grid, so its squares land on top of whatever that spin already produced, and every square it hits reveals a Coin, a Diamond, a Clover or a Loot Bag.

That structure changes what you are watching. Nine spins of ordinary wins are not paying you much, they are loading a magazine, and the counter tells you exactly how loaded it is before the last spin arrives. It is also the only moment in the game capable of covering a large part of a thirty square grid at once, which matters more here than it would anywhere else: the more squares you paint in one go, the better the odds of dropping several Loot Bags together, and Loot Bags are the symbol that doubles the round each time one lands. The finale is where the ceiling actually lives.

Pistols at Dawn takes the same idea and removes the wait. Its collector is progressive, starts at five, and fires on every spin instead of only the last, resetting to its previous total rather than to zero so it never starts from nothing again.

Boosters, charged on every spin

• BonusHunt FeatureSpins, 3x a spin. Each spin is five times more likely to trigger a round. Returns 96.24% if you then decline the gamble.
• Wild West FeatureSpins, 75x a spin. At least two Wilds land every spin, which is the only route to a cylinder. Returns 96.26%. FS symbols cannot land while it is active, so it cannot reach a bonus at all.

That second one needs reading twice. It costs 75x on every spin, it cannot trigger a round while it is switched on, and the round it is feeding you toward sells outright for 65x. It is a base game product at a bonus game price.

Feature buys, one payment

• High Noon Saloon, 65x. Ten free spins with a better chance of cylinders. Rated medium, the only product on the menu that is.
• Trail of Trickery, 250x. Ten spins plus a Bullet Collector sitting outside the grid that gains a bullet on every win and fires the whole lot on the final spin.
• Pistols at Dawn. Not on the menu. Five scatters only.

Pistols at Dawn is the one to want and the one you cannot buy. Its Bullet Collector is progressive, starts at five, fires on every spin rather than only the last, and resets to its previous total instead of to zero. Silver is the lowest coin that lands in it, so the Bronze tier is gone. Hacksaw has done this before, keeping the five scatter round off the menu, and it lands hardest here because the gap between it and Trail of Trickery is not cosmetic. The only door that is not five scatters is the gamble on a Trail of Trickery trigger, and it asks you to risk the round in your hand on odds nobody publishes, which is a steep price for the one thing the menu will not sell.

If you know the family, the coin ladder will be familiar. Le Hooligan runs Silver from 5x to 20x across three tiers, where Le Cowboy carries a fourth so Diamonds sit above Gold. The delivery is what changed: where Le Bandit revealed its prizes through squares, this one shoots them onto the board. And if the revolvers feel familiar for a different reason, 2 Wild 2 Die uses the same idea to a completely different end, firing bullets that make wilds and multipliers on paylines rather than uncovering coins to collect.