Wishbringer

Wishbringer: Slot Overview

Prepare to do a bit of rubbing players; we're taking a genie-themed online slot from developer Hacksaw Gaming for a whirl. On a magic carpet? Cliches aside, Wishbringer is a genie slot that has the potential to make some wishes come true, winning dough and so forth. However, if your wish is to fire up a freakishly original Hacksaw Gaming slot which takes you on a savage journey of discovery into uncharted territory, then the fact this is essentially a reskin of Beam Boys will probably leave that desire unfulfilled.

Wishbringer looks like, well, it looks like a genie slot, which is odd for Hacksaw Gaming since the team is usually more out there with the choice or at least the treatment of its themes. A One Thousand and One Nights/Aladdin atmosphere is alive and kicking, brought about by a floating blue genie in a lamp-adorned street scene and other related characters. An exotic soundtrack completes the picture, which, okay, sure, gets the job done.

Hacksaw and crew often tend to be payline people, but Wishbringer is a 4,096 ways-to-win slot played on a 6x4 matrix. Hiding in a tent somewhere is the game's medium volatile math model available in four RTP versions where 96.33% is the highest return possible. Unlike Beam Boys, Wishbringer has one set volatility, with no way of switching between Normal or Extreme. Several bonus buys are pickable, however, as are stakes of 10 c to $/€100.

Arabian flared card ranks 10 to A are Wishbringer's low pay symbols, while its highs are a necklace, some gold stuff, swords, a male character, and a female character. Royal wins of 6 OAK in size award 0.5 times the bet for all types, while a 6 OAK premium win pays 0.8 to 2 times the stake.

Wishbringer: Slot Features

Wishbringer's features section is surprisingly brief for a Hacksaw Gaming slot with Wild Genie Rows, the Arabian Nights bonus game, and feature buys to go over.

Wild Cloud Rows

Genie symbols may land on all reels except the leftmost reel. When one lands, the Genie symbol blows Clouds to the left across all positions on its row. All positions covered with a Genie or Cloud are wild, so they substitute for all paying symbols. A winning combination of 6 wild symbols pays 5x the bet.

Arabian Nights Bonus Game

In the base game, hitting 3, 4, 5, or 6 FS scatters awards 5, 10, 20, or 40 free spins, respectively. The Arabian Nights bonus game has the same mechanics as the base game, except there is a better chance of landing the Genie symbol. While active, landing 2 FS scatters adds +2 spins, while 3 scatters grant +4 more.

Bonus Buys

Players may activate BonusHunt Feature Spins from the bonus buy menu at 5x the bet to make triggering the bonus round 10 times more likely. Genie's Wish FeatureSpins cost 50x the bet and guarantee at least 1 Genie symbol on reels 2-6, while Genie's Magic FeatureSpins cost 200x the bet to guarantee at least 1 Genie symbol lands on reels 4-6. Entry to the bonus round can be bought as well for 110x the bet, granting 10, 20, or 40 free spins.

Wishbringer: Slot Verdict

That was unexpectedly odd. Wishbringer did not seem like a typical Hacksaw Gaming slot but rather something a junior partner studio might have produced instead of the big daddy of the group. Then again, it's not so odd, considering this is a remake of Beam Boys, pulling in pretty much all of the features and mechanics of the laser-eyed cat game for reuse in a genie-themed one. Perhaps it was the theme use which felt off. The presentation is quite run-of-the-mill for a Hacksaw Gaming slot, and at a squint, Wishbringer just looks like something a different studio would have produced.

But, generally speaking, reskins aren't bursting at the seams with creativity anyway, so there's that. What knocked Wishbringer down is that the genie theme has been so generically handled. This isn't meant as a criticism against games which look this way, but part of Hacksaw Gaming's towering reputation has been built off making games like Wanted Dead or a Wild or Hand of Anubis, slots which took regular slot themes and turned them into something dank, dark, and dangerous. Wishbringer, on the other hand, looks like the sort of game any old studio might have turned out. Genies are a fairly popular subject matter for a slot, and we've become accustomed to the studio using more inventive ideas to flavour its slots, or at least, when Hacksaw Gaming uses common themes, it usually does so in a more creative way.

On a gameplay level, Wishbringer performs about as well as Beam Boys did, and the combination of left-spreading wilds in a game with 4,096 ways to win can be lethal, and it's not hard to visualise how its 10,000x maximum win could be achieved. To sum up, Wishbringer is basically Beam Boys but without a freaky individual style to help set it apart and really make the features flicker.