Rusty & Curly

Rusty & Curly Slot Review & Demo Game

Rusty & Curly is a Western-themed video slot from Hacksaw Gaming that takes the genre in a direction most studios don’t. The Wild West has been mined so thoroughly by slot developers that you half expect the tumbleweeds to file for hazard pay, and most of these games go for grit: a sun-baked one-horse town, a brooding gunslinger, a soundtrack of buzzing flies and impending death.

Hacksaw has looked at all that and gone the other way. This is a deliberately daft take on cowboy lore, the kind where two of the least intimidating men ever drawn squint at each other across a dusty road in a place called Dorkville.

Rusty & Curly Slot Game Details

Meet the Rusty & Curly Characters

Which one is Rusty and which one is Curly? Going by the names, Curly is presumably the one with the curlier hair, while Rusty is the lanky, pot-bellied chap wearing the expression of a man who has just been handed the meaning of the universe and lacks the processing power to compute it.

They are joined by their animal sidekicks, Crispy & Chewy, and together they form a posse that would lose a gunfight to a strong breeze. It is Dork Unit meets The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and it sets a silly tone well before the reels start spinning.

Underneath the jokes sits a fairly serious machine, though. Rusty & Curly is a 5-reel, 4-row slot with 14 paylines, a default RTP of 96.29%, and a medium volatility rating, rated 3 out of 5 by Hacksaw.

Rusty & Curly: Slot Features

Wins are awarded for 3 to 5 matching symbols along a payline, from left to right. The low pays are your Jack-to-Ace royals, worth a measly 1x the bet for five of a kind. The highs are a skull, a hat, a bottle, a horseshoe and a sheriff’s badge, paying 3x to 10x the bet for a 5 OAK line. Wild Posters appear on every reel, substitute for the regular pays, and are worth 10x the bet for five. Stakes range from R0.10 to R100 per spin, and the top win is capped at 10,000x the bet, though that cap is only achievable in the bonuses, not the base game.

Almost Sticky Wild Posters

This is the headline base-game mechanic. Wild Posters can land carrying hearts, a multiplier of 2x to 10x, or both. As long as a poster holds at least one heart, it sticks around and triggers a respin, and each poster can carry up to 3 hearts, shedding one per respin. Once the hearts run out, the poster is removed on the next respin. During these respins, any free spin scatters that land get banked on a progress bar above the grid. Collect 3 or 4, and you’ll get a bonus.

Stick to the Plan Bonus

If you land 3 FS scatters in the base game, it will trigger 6 free spins. It’s the base game with the volume turned up: posters land with more hearts, and the multiplier ladder runs longer, climbing from 2x to 10x before leaping to 25x, 50x and 100x. While a poster carrying a heart sits on the grid, you keep earning respins that don’t count toward your free spins, so a good round keeps building on itself. No new FS scatters drop in here, so there’s no retrigger.

Who Shot the Sheriff Bonus

This is the big one. Four FS scatters award 12 free spins, split into 3 cycles, with each cycle consisting of 1 Collect Phase spin and 3 Payout Phase spins. In the Collect Phase, Rusty, Curly, or both expand into a Wild Reel and shoot 1 to 6 times at the multipliers scattered on the grid, with the total carried over to that reel for payouts. Available multiplier values run 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x, 10x, 15x, 20x, 25x, 50x, 100x and 200x.

The Payout Phase then runs 3 spins with those Rusty & Curly Wild Reels sitting sticky, holding their multipliers. Crispy & Chewy can also turn up and expand into Wild Reels during payouts, but they carry no multiplier and aren’t sticky, making them the budget version of the same idea. Land 3 FS in the feature for 1 extra cycle, or 4 FS for 2 extra cycles.

Bonus Buy

For anyone who can’t be bothered waiting, there is a Bonus Buy menu, and all options are highly volatile except the Stick-Up, which is medium:

• BonusHunt FeatureSpins™ at 3x the bet, making a trigger five times more likely (RTP 96.4%)
• The Stick-Up FeatureSpins™ at 50x the bet, guaranteeing at least 5 Wild Posters per spin (RTP 96.29%)
• Stick to the Plan! Bonus at 100x the bet (RTP 96.29%)
• Who Shot the Sheriff? Bonus at 300x the bet (RTP 96.41%)

Rusty & Curly: Slot Verdict

Rusty & Curly leans hard on humour, and the jokes are well integrated into the mechanics rather than just slapped on top. The Who Shot the Sheriff? Bonus is the main draw, a high-variance, do-or-die feature that pays big when the characters shoot up plenty of multipliers and falls flat when they don’t.

The 96.29% RTP is average, and the base game is unremarkable, with most of the win potential tied to the two bonuses, hence the buy menu. It doesn’t reinvent the Western slot, but its personality and the sheriff bonus give it enough to stand out from the grittier competition.

Play the Demo Game

Play our free Rusty & Curly demo slot game.