About Beast Below
Released on 22 June 2023, Beast Below is Hacksaw Gaming's dive into the deep: murky green light, indistinct shapes, sirens that are anything but friendly. The frame is standard studio issue — 5 reels, 4 rows, 14 fixed lines, stakes from €0.10 to €100 — but what sits inside it is not.
The base mechanic is called Expanding Sirens. One siren can appear on each reel, never more than one at a time, and it carries a multiplier between 2x and 200x. As soon as it takes part in a winning combination it stretches to the top of its reel, covering every position above it and acting as a wild. The detail that changes everything: when several sirens feed the same win, their multipliers are added together rather than multiplied. Three sirens at 50x therefore produce 150x on that line and no more — more predictable than a multiplicative system, but a good deal less explosive.
Three bonus symbols trigger the Siren's Call: 10 free spins during which sirens land far more often. The pink variant shows up here; it sticks to the grid and nudges up one row on every subsequent spin, keeping its 2x to 200x value until it exits the top. Extra bonus symbols during the round add 2 or 4 spins.
Four bonus symbols instead open the Down Below, the premium round, also over 10 spins. This time divers appear: each one expands across an entire reel and works as a wild multiplier from 2x to 200x. Every diver starts with three oxygen charges and spends one each time it moves to an adjacent reel; at zero it leaves the grid. A maximum of three divers can share the screen, and here too their values add up. This is the only configuration that gets anywhere near the ceiling.
That ceiling sits at 10,000x the stake. Hacksaw publishes the odds, which is both rare and honest: one chance in eleven million spins. On a machine where a session runs to a few hundred spins, read that number for what it is — a theoretical bound, not a horizon.
There are four buys, priced far apart. BonusHunt FeatureSpins costs 3x the stake and merely raises the trigger chance on a single spin. Siren FeatureSpins at 50x guarantees at least two sirens on the purchased spin. Buying the Siren's Call directly costs 120x, and Down Below 200x. RTP differs slightly between these modes: 96.29 % for BonusHunt, 96.32 % for Siren FeatureSpins, 96.27 % for Siren's Call and 96.31 % for Down Below. The gaps are small, but they exist and they lean the right way.
Then there is the question of which RTP you are served. Hacksaw ships its usual set of four tiers: 96.29 %, 94.27 %, 92.25 % and 88.28 %. The operator decides, and nothing obliges it to say so anywhere except in the game's info sheet. Open the « i » menu before betting: more than eight points separate the best from the worst.
With volatility rated 4 out of 5 and a hit rate around 25 %, Beast Below sits a notch below the studio's most vicious releases. Worth comparing with Octo Attack for the marine setting and Wanted Dead or a Wild for the multi-bonus structure.
