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LIT City is RIP City with fresh spray paint
Hacksaw Gaming has taken its 2023 alley-brawl slot, RIP City, repainted the graffiti, and handed the result to Stake as an exclusive. LIT City is that repaint. It uses the exact same 5×5 grid, the same 19 paylines, and the same 12,500x maximum win ceiling, with the same expanding cat carrying the whole game on its back. Even the two bonus rounds are named after the original cast, Ro$$ the mouse and Maxx the cat.
The RTP is 94.27%, though figures near 97.4% circulate for the Stake version, so what you actually get depends on where you play. Volatility is high, occupying four segments out of five on the meter, and my own session certainly backed that up: fifteen base spins in a row paid nothing at all.
The wild cat and its tongue
The entire game hinges on the Wild Cat, an expanding wild with a condition attached. The cat only stretches down to the bottom of the grid if the expanded symbol would complete at least one win. When it does, every cell it covers turns wild, and since the 19 lines cross all five rows, one expanded cat can bridge several paylines at once. A cat whose expansion wouldn’t complete a win simply stays a single 1×1 wild, and each reel holds at most one.
The multipliers hide in the ordinary WILD symbol. On its own, it acts as a standard substitute. But if a Wild Cat expands through one, that WILD becomes a multiplier for the whole expanded cat, ranging anywhere from 2x to 200x. When several multiplied cats sit in the same win, their values add together before being applied. That stacking mechanic is the road to the 12,500x ceiling, which the game notes is reachable in the base game and in both bonuses. Hit it, and the round ends on the spot with any remaining spins discarded.
The catch is how rarely the base game actually deals you the ingredients. During a stretch of fifteen spins at €2, not a single Wild Cat landed. Not one that failed to expand, none at all. The base game can run for long stretches with its headline mechanic completely absent, which is worth knowing before you sit down to grind for scatters.
Cat and mouse: the two bonuses
Landing three FS scatters opens the Ro$$ Bonus, awarding ten free spins where Wild Cats and WILDs simply land more often. Think of it as the plain version of the round. If you land four scatters during the feature, the game upgrades you to the Maxx Bonus when the spin ends, topping your spin count back up to ten if it had dropped below.
Hitting four scatters from cold, or paying for a 200x buy, takes you straight to the Maxx Bonus, and this is the round the game is truly built around. You get ten free spins with a reel activation mechanic: whenever a Wild Cat lands on a reel, that reel is activated and guarantees a cat on every remaining spin, marked by a yellow arrow overhead. The momentum snowballs. Each new guaranteed cat makes the next expansion more likely to connect into a win, and each connected expansion makes the multiplier WILDs matter more. Landing three scatters inside either round adds four extra spins to your total.
I bought the Maxx Bonus for €400 at a €2 bet and watched that snowball happen in slow motion. The first spin paid zero. By the second retrigger, three of the five reels were activated, multipliers of 3x and 4x had landed on expanded cats, and the biggest single spin slammed a €362 win onto the screen. Eighteen spins in total returned €1,119.20, which is 2.8 times the price and 559.6x the bet.
Five things to buy
The buy menu holds five entries split into two different kinds of purchases. The Ro$$ Bonus at 110x and the Maxx Bonus at 200x are one-off tickets. The other three are FeatureSpins toggles that charge you on every spin until you switch them off: 3x per spin makes a bonus five times more likely, 20x guarantees two Wild Cats on each spin, and 50x guarantees three.
The pricing has one quiet consequence. Since the max win is reachable in all three main modes, the 110x Ro$$ entry is technically the cheapest one-off ticket to the same 12,500x ceiling the 200x round chases. Meanwhile, the 20x toggle is the sharpest option of the lot, acting as the only purchase whose card is marked very high volatility rather than high.
A colouring book with a swearing problem
Visually, the whole game is a colouring-book joke. The alley, the fire escapes, the dumpsters, and the two slouching characters are drawn in inked black and white, leaving only the graffiti, the symbols, and the cat’s endless pink tongue to carry any colour. The expanded Wild Cat is literally the cat sticking that tongue out down the full height of the reel. Win cards slam onto the screen in huge type and swear at you with the letters starred out: the big win reads “SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM” and the top tier shouts “TH*S JUST GOT REAL”, which is also the heading the game puts over its own max-win promise.
Underneath the attitude, the paytable is deliberately flat. Card ranks 10 through A sit at the bottom in grey, with red street props above them, and the best of them, a five of a kind, pays just 20x. A full line of wilds manages 25x. On a game with a 12,500x ceiling, that means the symbols themselves are nearly worthless. All the real money lives in expanded cats with added multipliers, and nowhere else.
What RIP City players already know
The skeleton is exactly that of RIP City: a 5×5 grid, 19 lines, a 12,500x max win, the downward-expanding cat, and even the same cat and mouse on the sidelines. What has changed beyond the paint is the temperature. RIP City is rated very high volatility and plays at 96.22%; LIT City sits a notch lower at high volatility, and this version plays at 94.27%. Anyone who knows the original can skip the manual entirely and just decide whether the new alley is worth visiting.
Pros & Cons
What works
- The Maxx Bonus genuinely snowballs: getting three activated reels turned my round from a blank first spin into €1,119.20.
- The conditional expansion is smart. Cats only stretch when it pays, so every landing cat is a real event rather than just decoration.
- Added-then-applied multipliers up to 200x give the 12,500x ceiling a believable route.
- The monochrome art with colour reserved for the symbols is the best-looking thing Hacksaw’s alley has produced.
What doesn’t
- The base game is a desert. Going fifteen spins without a win, and without the headline mechanic even appearing once, is a tough grind.
- Playing at 94.27% is a thin rung to balance on when the same game runs richer elsewhere.
- It’s a repaint. If you’ve played RIP City, the only new idea here is the wallpaper.
- The paytable is so flat that any round without a multiplied cat is small change by design.
Verdict
The Maxx Bonus returned €1,119.20 on its €400 price, and that round is the only place the game really showed its teeth. Everything LIT City does well happens inside those free spins: the reels lighting up one by one, the guaranteed cats, and the multipliers stacking. Everything outside of those moments is just waiting, dressed in admittedly excellent graffiti.
That makes this a buyer’s game rather than a grinder’s. The player it fits best is the one willing to put 200x on the table for the reel-activation round and treat the base game as a loading screen. At €2 a spin, the base game gave me fifteen zeros and nothing else to report.
