Dead By Noon

Dead by Noon: Slot Overview

Whilst Wild West slots abound, developer Hacksaw Gaming has a particular way of making them that causes them to stand out from the group. The studio's foray into this grim, violent corner of the online casino lobby began with Wanted Dead or a Wild and has continued through various brutal and bloody releases since. The current one is Dead by Noon, which, judging by the title, is another Western that would rather fill you full of lead than share a quiet whiskey at the local saloon. This is a game that loads up a straight shooting Multiplier Chamber feature, which has the oomph to create ludicrously powerful values - if you're lucky. If not, well, there's that title…

A glance is all it takes to realise that Dead by Noon sits alongside other Hacksaw Gaming Westerns like Bullets and Bounty and Duel at Dawn. The mood is bleak, unforgiving, nicely drawn, where a character who is absolutely all business looks down on players like they've taken lead to the gut and are lying on a dusty street, slowly bleeding out. Dead by Noon is not here to make friends, it seems. And while the Wild West might not have been as wild or violent as it is often portrayed in pop culture, it certainly is in Dead by Noon, which is a shoot first, ask questions later type game, if it deigns to ask questions at all, slow draw.

A 5x4 reelset is where the duelling takes place, and when the dust settles, winning combinations are evaluated by 14 paylines. When loading a bet, the options range from $/€0.10 to $/€100 per spin, and various feature buys and ante bets are provided. The volatility has been rated as 5 out of 5, which suits the game's do-or-die attitude, while the RTP on the highest setting is 96.27%.

The four playing card suits - clubs, diamonds, spades, and hearts are the low pays, awarding 1x the bet for a 5 OAK winning combination. High pays include wheels, skulls, hats, guns, and badges, paying 2x to 5x the stake for a 5 OAK hit. Wilds are present on all reels. They substitute regular paying symbols and award 5x if 5 wilds create a winning line.

Dead by Noon: Slot Features

Dead by Noon's features are Row Cascades, Multiplier Chambers, the Draw or Die bonus, the No Aim, No Fame bonus, and feature buys.

Row Cascades

Dead by Noon uses the Row Cascades feature seen in Smoking Dragon. When a winning combination hits, symbols on the bottom row are removed, and all other symbols drop down a row. New symbols are added at the top to refill the top row.

Multiplier Chamber

When a Poker Chip symbol lands, it activates if there is a win on the grid or if the Poker Chip would be part of a win. When activated, Poker Chips trigger the Multiplier Chamber above that reel before wins are evaluated. The corresponding Multiplier Chambers reveal a number of 1-9. Activated Poker Chips transform into a wild. Multiplier Chambers remain active during Row Cascades, and new Poker Chips can land on reels with inactive Multiplier Chambers on cascades.

Wins are multiplied by the combined values of activated Multiplier Chambers from left to right. For example, if the Multiplier Chamber numbers are 2, 5, and 1, the multiplier is x251. Only numbers in a continuous line from the leftmost Multiplier Chamber are combined. Multiplier Chambers reset between spins.

Draw or Die Bonus Game

Landing 3 scatters in the base game triggers 8 free spins in the Draw or Die bonus. This feature keeps the base game mechanics but has a higher chance of landing Poker Chips. In both bonus rounds, landing 2 or 3 scatters awards an extra +2 or +4 free spins, respectively.

No Aim, No Fame Bonus Game

Hitting 4 scatter in the main game awards No Aim, No Fame's 10 free spins. Building on the base game mechanics, at least one Poker Chip is guaranteed to land on each spin.

Feature Buys

In this part of the game, players may activate BonusHunt FeatureSpins for 3x to make triggering a bonus 5x more likely, Hold 'Em or Fold 'Em FeatureSpins for 50x to guarantee at least one Poker Chip lands, or High-Roller FeatureSpins for 1,000x. The Draw or Die bonus costs 80x to trigger, or No Aim, No Fame costs 200x the stake.

High-Roller FeatureSpins

During High-Roller FeatureSpins, only Wanted Posters and blank symbols land. When Wanted Posters land, the possible number per reel is 3-4 Posters on reel 1, 2-4 on reel 2, 1-3 on reel 3 and 4, and 1-2 on reel 5. When the grid settles, the player gets six shots. Five shots are fired, one per reel. If the shots hit a Wanted Poster on all five reels, the max win is awarded. If four shots hit Wanted Posters and one hits a dead symbol, the Lucky Shot triggers a sixth shot at the reel where the shot missed the Poster. Each spin has a 1 in 10.39 chance of winning the max win.

Dead by Noon: Slot Verdict

If your idea of fun is metaphorically taking shots at and dodging bullets from a take-no-prisoners Western-themed slot, then Dead by Noon should be on the to-demo list. Right from the get-go, it strikes a serious, hostile tone, and with a bit of imagination, it isn't a million miles from standing 20 paces away from a mad, bad dude with an itchy trigger finger. It's a game with a good handful of sturdy features and little in the way of complex machinations to get in the way of the shooting.

What immediately stood out was the potency lying latent in the Multiplier Chamber feature. The initial assumption was that multiplier values above the reels would be added together to form a total multiplier, which could have been effective on its own. However, that's just not rugged enough for Dead by Noon, which actually concatenates the values into one, potentially monstrous value. There are conditions. It won't just join any old numbers together. They must sit consecutively from the leftmost reel to be considered, so there are plenty of opportunities to be thwarted or let down. But, there is also the chance that big two, three or more digit multipliers end up on the draw, which have the potential to cause tremendous devastation. It wasn't easy lining up long lines of usable multis, though, so brace for a possible slog. When they do join up, though, multis can work like petrol and fire with the Row Cascade feature.

If that's still not hard enough, Dead by Noon lays out High-Roller FeatureSpins for those with deep, responsible pockets and nerves of steel to attempt battling their way to the game's 10,000x win cap. Or not. Wind it all together, and Dead by Noon is a Hacksaw Gaming oil-painted Wild West shoot-out that is the very definition of the quick or the dead.