Cup Heroes Slot by Hacksaw Gaming

Copa America on a 5x5 Grid

Cup Heroes is a football-themed slot by Hacksaw Gaming, built as an official tie-in with the 2024 CONMEBOL Copa America tournament. It launched in partnership with Kaizen Gaming (Betano), making it the first branded slot in Hacksaw's catalog. The grid runs 5 reels by 5 rows with 19 fixed paylines, and the game carries Hacksaw's top-tier volatility rating alongside a 96.16% RTP and 12,500x max win.

The visual package leans into tournament branding. Copa America and Betano logos sit alongside the reels, the background is a packed stadium under floodlights, and the colour palette is dominated by deep blue with red and white accents. Low-pay symbols are styled card royals (10, J, Q, K, A), while the premium set is all football gear - a referee's whistle, goalkeeper gloves, football boots, a match ball, and a trophy. The trophy pays the highest at 15x for five of a kind.

The Penalty Shootout Mechanic

Everything in Cup Heroes revolves around the VS symbol. When VS lands on a reel and forms part of a winning combination, it expands to cover that entire reel, turning it fully wild. Then a penalty animation plays - a kicker shoots, a goalkeeper dives. Score a goal and the reel gets a higher multiplier. Get saved, and the multiplier is lower. Individual VS multipliers range from 2x to 10x.

Where things get interesting: if multiple VS symbols appear across different reels in the same winning combo, their multiplier values are added together before being applied to the win. Three VS symbols scoring 8x, 5x, and 10x would combine for a 23x multiplier on that payline hit. Fill all five reels with VS symbols and the entire grid becomes wild - that's theoretically how you approach the 12,500x ceiling.

The regular Wild symbol (without the penalty animation) also pays 25x for five of a kind, matching the VS symbol's own payout. Both substitute for all standard paytable symbols.

Overtime and Golden Goal Bonuses

Three FS scatter symbols trigger the Overtime Bonus - 10 free spins with an increased chance of VS symbols landing on each spin. The base game mechanics stay the same, so every VS still expands and triggers a penalty duel. The difference is frequency. VS symbols show up noticeably more often during Overtime.

Four scatters activate the Golden Goal Bonus instead. Same 10 free spins, but now at least one VS symbol is guaranteed to land on every single spin. That guarantee changes the math significantly. Every free spin produces at minimum one full-reel wild with a multiplier attached, and spins where two or three VS symbols land start stacking those additive multipliers.

Buy Bonus Options

Hacksaw includes four FeatureSpins options through their standard buy menu. BonusHunt FeatureSpins increases the chance of triggering any bonus by 5x during normal play. Goal Rush FeatureSpins guarantees at least two VS symbols per spin in the base game - a paid shortcut to those additive multiplier combinations. The other two options skip the base game entirely: one buys directly into the Overtime Bonus, the other into the Golden Goal Bonus. Exact pricing scales with bet size and varies by casino implementation.

A Branded Niche Release

Cup Heroes launched in June 2024 to coincide with the Copa America tournament, initially available in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and the UK through Kaizen's casino brands. That limited rollout explains why coverage on major review sites is thin - BigWinBoard hasn't posted a full review, and community discussion is sparse.

As a branded tie-in built for a specific tournament window, it sits outside Hacksaw's usual output of high-volatility originals like Wanted Dead or a Wild or the Chaos Crew series. The 5x5 grid with fixed paylines is unusual for the studio, which tends toward scatter-pays and cluster mechanics in their bigger releases. The penalty shootout concept is genuinely distinct, though. No other Hacksaw slot uses an animated duel to determine multiplier values, and the additive multiplier math across multiple reels creates a clear path to the max win that feels different from their typical tumble-and-multiply formula.

The 19-payline structure does limit win frequency compared to Hacksaw's scatter-pay games. Base game sessions lean dry between VS appearances, and the low-pay symbols top out at just 2x for five of a kind. Without VS multipliers in play, individual wins stay small. That's the price of a mechanic that puts all its weight on the penalty feature.