Powered by SlotsReach.com
If you’ve spent any time spinning Hacksaw Gaming’s recent catalog, Hellmageddon might give you a sense of déjà vu. This game relies on one big mathematical hook: turning standard addition into massive multiplication.
While the regular paylines will keep you ticking over, make no mistake: you are here for the Coin symbols. But is the chase worth it?
The Base Game: A Slow Trickle
The standard paytable comes first, and it’s flat. Played across a 5×4 grid with 1,024 ways to win, the highest-paying regular symbol (the finger gun) pays a mere 1x your stake for a five-of-a-kind line. Everything else pays less than your bet.
During my session, standard hits provided a very slow trickle of returns. A “good” base game hit for me was around 1.7x my stake. However, Hacksaw has included a clever cascading mechanic to help out: when you hit a winning combo, the game removes every instance of those winning symbols from the entire grid, not just the ones involved in the win. This opens up a lot of real estate for fresh symbols to drop in, keeping the spins dynamic while you wait for the main event.
The CoinWays Mechanic: Boom or Bust
The real potential of Hellmageddon lies in the CoinWays mechanic, which operates as a completely separate layer over the standard grid.
Coins land with values between 1x and 10x. If you land coins on adjacent reels, starting from reel 1, the game adds up the coins on each reel and then multiplies those totals together from left to right. A single coin on reel 1 pays its face value, but connect a chain across all five reels, and the math accelerates at a terrifying pace.
Reel 1 is a strict gatekeeper.
If you don’t have a coin on the first reel, the chain breaks before it even starts. During my session, I saw coins land on about two-thirds of my spins, but they frequently missed reel 1. In one particularly agonizing spin, I landed 1x, 1x, 3x, and 3x coins across reels 2 through 5. It was a beautiful 9x multiplier product sitting in plain sight, but because reel 1 was empty, it paid nothing.
Enter the Dynamite
When you do manage to connect a live chain, the new Dynamite symbol acts as your best friend. If a Dynamite lands in a 3×3 radius around an active coin, it adds between 1x and 10x to every active coin in that zone before the final multiplication happens.
It’s an incredible booster, but again, it’s bound by the rules. I had a spin with two Dynamite sticks and a coin on reel 3, but without a chain starting from the left, they were just dead weight.
Free Spins: Hellcation & Tandemonium
Land enough scatters, and you’ll trigger one of two bonus rounds. Interestingly, Hacksaw opted not to use a progressive multiplier or collection meter here. The coin values reset on every spin, making the bonus feel more like a sequence of high-potential independent drops rather than a climbing ladder.
- Hellcation (3 Scatters): Awards 10 free spins with a noticeably higher hit frequency for Coins and Dynamite.
- Tandemonium (4 Scatters): Awards 10 free spins and guarantees that at least one Coin and one Dynamite will land on every single spin.
Tandemonium is obviously the goal here, but a word of warning to players: the guarantee just means a coin will land somewhere on the board. It does not guarantee it will land on that crucial first reel.
Every mode can reach the 10,000x max win, but only through a Coin chain that starts on reel 1.
Supreme Zeus shares this cascading 5×4 ways board, with a higher max win of 12,500x against 10,000x here. The Dynamite symbol makes the potential here feel a bit more explosive. It’s an unapologetic slot that will test your patience with dead coins, but when that left-to-right connection finally hits, the math is a beautiful thing to watch.
