Time Spinners: Slot Overview

One thought, sparked by the science writing of Marcus Chown, is whether “now” even truly exists. Starlight can take years to reach us, and even at close range there’s always a tiny delay before light and sound arrive. It’s minuscule, sure, yet it suggests we’re constantly interpreting the world as it was a moment ago rather than exactly as it is. That idea popped up again while looking at Time Spinners, an online slot from Hacksaw Gaming. This release plays with the notion of time, sometimes with a darker edge, while throwing in wild multipliers and a Dusk Till Dawn bonus round.

A second riddle came from the Time Spinners game screen itself. At the center is a 5-reel, 4-row grid, hanging over a pit on chains and anchored to four shattered stone pillars. It’s hard to read the scene. It almost resembles a coffin being lowered, and the music has a mournful, dirge-like tone while the reels sit still. When the spin begins, the soundtrack turns more expansive, but overall Time Spinners gives off an odd atmosphere that’s tougher to define than the usual fruit, Western, or Egyptian themes seen in many earlier Hacksaw titles. Versus some previous releases, it feels a bit short on character, which leaves it looking somewhat generic. Perhaps that’s just part of the time-themed mystery.

Getting started (and trying to make sense of it all) means choosing a stake of 10 p/c to $/€100 per spin and launching Time Spinners on the device of your choice. With Highly volatile gameplay, it’s worth checking you’re on the 96.19% return to player version for the best setup, since Hacksaw slots often come with multiple RTP configurations. The game uses 16 paylines for wins, requiring at least three matching symbols, and they must connect from the left side of the grid.

On the symbol front, Time Spinners includes eight standard pay symbols along with several specials. From lowest to highest, the low pays are clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades, followed by books, scrolls, timers, and gyro-like devices as the premium symbols. Hitting five of a kind pays 1-2x the bet for the card suits or 5-20x the bet for the four higher-value icons. Wilds can land on all reels, substituting for any regular paying symbol, and a five-wild line returns 20x the bet.

Time Spinners: Slot Features

Digging deeper into the game’s oddities reveals Watch wild multipliers, Sync symbols, Ghosts, and a Dusk Till Dawn bonus round.

Watch

Red rimmed watches act as wild multiplier symbols and can replace all paying symbols. Whenever Watches form part of a winning line, they display a multiplier ranging from x2 to x12. The golden rimmed watch is the Sync symbol. When it lands, it sync all multipliers on the grid to match the one with the highest value.

Dusk Till Dawn

The Dusk Till Dawn bonus triggers when 3 Ghost symbols appear on the screen. The opening stage of the bonus round focuses on collecting Watch symbols. In this phase, 3 spins are awarded featuring non-winning symbols and special symbols. Each time a new Watch symbol land, or when an Echo/Epic Echo symbol impacts a Watch symbol, the spin counter is reset. Here’s how the special symbols work:

• Sticky Watch – remains on the reels with a multiplier value of x2-x12.
• Sync Your Watches – syncs all multipliers to the highest value in view.
• Echo – lands and reveals a value of x1 to x50, which is added to all Watches in a 3×3 area around it.
• Epic Echo – lands and reveals a value of x2-x10, which multipliers all Watch values in a 3×3 area around it.

Once the collect phase finishes, any Sticky Watches stay in place for the payout phase, and standard symbols return to the reels. During the collect phase, every time the free spins counter is replenished, one additional payout spin is added to the payout phase, with a minimum of 3 payout spins.

Buy Bonus

Using the Buy Bonus button gives players two choices. Give Me Watches (RTP 96.24%) is priced at x2 the bet for a round where Ghosts do not land, but up to 15 Watches can appear instead, with multipliers reaching x24. A minimum of two Watches is guaranteed. The other option is purchasing Dusk Till Dawn for 100x the bet (RTP 96.2%).

Time Spinners: Slot Verdict

It may not be obvious right away, but Time Spinners carries a faintly sinister undertone that creeps in like a chill at the back of your mind. The strange stone pit backdrop, the Ghost’s spectral hands, the funeral-like touches in the music, and the nods to time’s unstoppable advance all add to the unease. It’s not as overtly macabre as Hands of Anubis, yet it’s still a bit disquieting. Perhaps we read too much into it, because in other respects Time Spinners also feels like something Red Tiger could have produced. That’s not meant as criticism—there’s a familiar quality to the symbols, the time motifs, and the polished visuals.

The bonus round also has a slightly Red Tiger-ish flavor, while still being very much Hacksaw in key ways. It brought to mind the Dead Man’s Hand Bonus Round from Wanted Dead or a Wild, though it seemed harder to properly ignite here than in the Western title. The collect phase typically dropped 3-4 Watch symbols, usually topping out around x2-x5 multiplier values. Echo symbols didn’t show up often, and Epic Echoes were almost nowhere to be seen—though that could simply have been bad luck. With a highly volatile Hacksaw Gaming slot, swings are part of the deal, and Time Spinners seems to fit that profile. When it decides to cooperate, it’s easy to picture huge sticky multipliers building up with help from Echo/Epic Echo symbols, creating electric bonus rounds among plenty of more average ones. At its peak, Time Spinners is capable of paying up to 10,000x the bet.

Time Spinner brings some appealing ideas, but ultimately it felt a little underfilled. The slippery theme makes it difficult to pin down what the studio was truly going for—unless the intent is time running out and the Grim Reaper closing in, which is undeniably bleak. For a Hacksaw release, there isn’t a single element in Time Spinners that clearly steals the show. It’s a solid game, but a slightly muddled and somewhat cautious approach stops Time Spinners from ranking among the studio’s stronger outings.