Steamrunners

Steamrunners: Slot Overview

Steampunk has been a recurring muse in online slots for over a decade, blending Victorian-era aesthetics with mechanical fantasy. Games like Steam Tower by NetEnt set the early standard, inviting players into worlds of gears, goggles, and brass machinery. Over the years, a handful of others, like Cazino Zeppelin and Land of Zenith, have kept the genre alive, each adding its own twist to the steam-powered dream. Now, Hacksaw Gaming joins the ranks with Steamrunners, a slot that reimagines this retro-futuristic world through its own distinctive style and mechanics.

Using the game info, it would seem Steamrunners is a name given to the 'fierce, fearless' characters who appear on screen, 'riding gas-powered gadgets and rogue airships' on a journey 'through skybound cities to glimmering sky courts and beyond.' Apologies for all the quotes, but there is a literary quality to steampunk, and Hacksaw Gaming's words paint quite a nice picture. Its art team has painted quite a nice picture on the screen as well, which displays a city in the clouds as well as a mix of genre-related items. However, whilst Steamrunners captures the steampunk spirit, you may also get the impression this isn't quite the studio's foremost area of expertise.

A metallic grid made up of pipes, lights, cogs, 5 reels, and 4 rows is where the gaming takes place. Winning combinations of symbols are evaluated by 14 paylines, and all start from the leftmost reel, paying left to right. For volatility, Hacksaw Gaming has gone for a medium setting, while supplying a betting range of $/€0.10 to $/€100 per spin. Four RTP variants have been designed, where 96.32% is the highest of the lot to look out for.

Steamrunners' pay symbols are ten in number. They include 10-A card royals, a telescope, a scroll, a hat, a gramophone, and a pair of glasses. Royal 5 OAK wins are worth 1x the bet, whereas a 5 OAK premium picture symbol combination pays 2.5x to 5x the bet. The wild symbol replaces all regular symbols on the paytable and awards 10x the bet if 5 wilds create a win of their own.

Steamrunners: Slot Features

While admiring the clouds, be on the lookout for spreading Gas Canister symbols, Sky City, Gaslight District, and Court of High Steam free spins, as well as feature buys.

Wild Gas Canister Symbols

When a Green Gas Canister lands, it spreads horizontally and vertically, turning itself and nearby low-paying symbols into wilds if they're part of a win. The spread continues if new low pays or wilds connect to the transformed ones. A Purple Gas Canister transforms itself and all low-paying symbols on the grid into wilds, again only if they're part of a win. Transformed wilds can randomly get a multiplier from x2 to x200, while existing wilds hit by a canister receive x2. If more than one multiplier appears in a win, their values are added together before being applied. Only one Gas Canister can land at a time.

Sky City Bonus Game

This feature is activated by landing 3 FS scatters, and 8 free spins are awarded. On top of the base game mechanics, all wild symbols with multipliers are sticky, so they stay in the same position till the bonus ends. Wild multipliers double each time they are affected by a spreading Gas Canister symbol, up to a maximum of x5,000. In all three bonus rounds, hitting 2 or 3 scatters grants an extra +2 or +4 free spins, respectively.

Gaslight District Bonus Game

Gaslight District's 10 free spins are awarded by landing 4 FS scatters in the base game. It plays the same as Sky City, with the addition that at least one wild is present on the grid during the entire bonus.

Court of High Steam Hidden Epic Bonus Game

Hitting 5 scatters in the main game triggers this hidden bonus and 10 free spins. It keeps the base game mechanics but lands one Gas Canister on every free spin.

Feature Buys

Steamrunners has four features to buy. They are BonusHunt FeatureSpins at 3x per spin, making it 5 times more likely to trigger a bonus game or SmokeShow FeatureSpins, which guarantee 1 Gas Canister lands for 50x the bet. Moreover, Sky City and Gaslight District may be bought for 80x or 200x the bet, respectively.

Steamrunners: Slot Verdict

It's been a while since a steampunk-styled slot came along. For a while there, steampunk slots gathered quite a bit of momentum, with titles like those in Yggdrasil Gaming's Cazino Zeppelin range or Push Gaming's Land of Zenith being strong examples. Interest might have waned a bit since then, but Hacksaw Gaming's Steamrunners helps rekindle the love affair of all things brass. It's given the team an excuse to come up with a mechanical world that brought to mind the popular Netflix series Arcane, and also The Aeronauts, a film inspired by the real-life balloon adventures of meteorologist James Glaisher, which taught us that riding high in the sky might be beautifully freeing, but it is also mighty cold up there.

Steamrunners is no cold game, though. It's actually rather warm and invites players to step into its pipe and gadget world in the clouds. We all know Hacksaw Gaming's affinity with all things spreading, but instead of spreading vertically, as in say Hounds of Hell, or horizontally adding wilds, aka Beam Boys, in Steamrunners, the spreading isn't restricted to a single direction. Rather, it oozes about the grid depending on the potential for winning combinations. What really juices the wild transformation effect is the chance that some of them may reveal multipliers of up to x200. Adding extra steam to the engine, wild multipliers are sticky during the two lower-tier, non-hidden bonus rounds. Taking the idea one step even further is the fact wild multipliers can be doubled all the way to x5,000, which is huge for a Hacksaw Gaming slot. Huge for any slot. The trick is getting significant wild multipliers on the grid in the first place, which could be challenging.

But it's a possibility, and so is achieving wins of up to 10,000x the bet in all game modes. As such, Steamrunners stands as an intriguing entry in Hacksaw Gaming's portfolio and a further exploration of the studio's fascination with spreading mechanics. It's perhaps not an outright standout, and the gameplay can feel demanding, with big wins relying heavily on what may be rare multiplier setups. Still, there's potential here, supported by a neatly realised steampunk aesthetic that gives the imagination room to wander while hitting spin.