If you’re looking for one of the most expansive case opening websites out there, Hellcase is one of your best bets. It has a lot of extra currencies, features, and even has a premium subscription tier. In our full Hellcase review, we will go over the site’s functionality, performance, and features in order to determine if it’s worth your time and money.
Hellcase is a CS2 skin website with a ton of functionality and extra games. Because of this, it can be hard to navigate and understand. Once you get over the learning curve, the website offers a fun gameplay loop along with some interesting features.
Pros
- Tons of stuff to do on the website
- Lots of cases (including cheap cases) to open
- Special events are very detailed and rewarding
- Lots of giveaways with varying entry requirements; there’s something for everyone, including free giveaways
- Crowdfunding cases are used to sponsor FaceIt tournaments
Cons
- Case odds aren’t displayed for some cases
- Very overwhelming for newcomers
- No live support chat
- Overall website design is shouty and counter-intuitive
Info
Available Games: Case Openings, Upgrader, Tradeup Contract, Case Battles, Giveaways
Special Features: Premium Subscription, Special Events, Free Cases
Deposit Methods: CS2 Skins, RUST Skins, Dota 2 Skins, skinpay, BTC, BCH, DOGE, ETH, LTC, XRP, USDT, TRX, Kinguin Gift Card, Alipay, AMEX, Discover, G2APAY, Mastercard, UnionPay, VISA
Withdrawal Methods: CS2 Skins, RUST Skins, DOTA 2 Skins, Shadowpay
Games on Hellcase
Case Openings
Hellcase has a ton of cases for users to open, varying from extremely cheap to very expensive. These cases get refreshed and rotated often, which keeps the case section feeling fresh.
Something that we really like with Hellcase’s case section is that there are also a lot of options for players who aren’t willing to spend a lot of money. The cheapest case we found during our testing period was a case that cost $0.06 to open. That’s very cheap and is great news for people who just want to have some fun by depositing their random CS2 drops that they don’t want to sell on the Community Market. Obviously, those cheap cases have terrible odds and won’t contain any truly top tier items, but it’s nice to see that the option is there.
A point of criticism is that for these cheapest cases, the odds aren’t properly displayed. The top prize in the ‘Funny Farm’ case ($0.06) is a ‘random classified skin’. However, it doesn’t say which pool of skins it pulls from (and we assume it won’t have an MP9 Wild Lily or something in there) which can make things confusing.
Upgrade
In the upgrader, you can add a skin (or website balance) and try to upgrade it to a skin or ingame item that’s worth more. The higher the value of the item you’re aiming for is compared to the value of the item(s) you’ve put in, the lower your odds are of hitting the upgrade.
Once you’re satisfied with the odds, clicking the upgrade button will cause a wheel to spin. It it lands on a colored section, you’ve hit the upgrade. If it does not, you lose your bet.
Tradeup Contract
In the tradeup contract, players add up to 10 skins. Their value gets added up and you then get a random skin within a certain price range based on the value of the items that you put in. As an example: putting in $100 worth of skins could get you a skin between $70 and $160. There is no way of knowing precisely what skin is going to come out of the tradeup contract, and that’s where the risk factor is: you could get something that’s a lot more valuable, or you could lose a lot of value.
Hellcase offers three difficulty tiers for an upgrade: the higher you go, the more profit you can get. However, your odds of hitting a profitable tradeup also decrease in the higher difficulties.
Case Battle
In case battles, users open cases against other users. You can play 1v1, 1v1v1, or 1v1v1v1. The creator of a battle decides which cases will get opened. Others can then join the battle for the price of the selected cases. Once that’s done, all cases get auto-opened and the player with the highest unboxed value at the end of it all wins the entire pot.
Compared to other websites, Hellcase’s case battle functionality is rather limited. There are no options for teaming up here, and there’s also no mode where the lowest total unboxed value wins the pot in case you want to spice things up. There is the option to create private battles, but if you’re into crazy case battles there are better sites out there.
Giveaways
Hellcase offers a lot of giveaways. These are hosted by Hellcase themselves as well as regular users and community figures. What’s nice here is that there are regular free giveaways. Obviously, those free giveaways have incredibly low odds (since thousands of people join those) and the prizes are rather low value items, but at least the options is there. Many websites don’t even offer free giveaways, so this is a definite plus for Hellcase.
The other giveaways have varying entry requirements. These range from having to deposit a certain amount of dollars on the website to following specific pages on the internet. When it comes to giveaways, there’s a little something to be found for everyone on Hellcase. While giveaways aren’t necessarily the most interactive game to play (they’re not even really a game) we do like how many options there are on Hellcase, so if you’re a fan of regular giveaways then Hellcase is the place to be.
Features
Hellcase has a lot of extra features and functions. We’ll go over some of the most interesting ones in this section.
Hellcase Premium
Hellcase offers three premium subscription tiers (paid monthly) with different rewards. The premium subscription gives you access to free cases as well as exclusive giveaways, a top-up bonus, exclusive cases (which cost balance to open) and -for the higher tiers- premium wheel spins.
At a cost of $25 per month at the highest tier, we find the prices for Hellcase Premium to be rather democratic. Obviously, getting premium won’t mean that you’re guaranteed to profit (all of these websites operate on a ‘the house always wins’ principle after all) but it’s a nice feature for players who have some extra cash to spend.
Free Case
Compared to some other websites, Hellcase’s free case system is rather underwhelming.
In order to get access to the free case, you need either have a Hellcase avatar on your Steam profile or you need to deposit a certain amount of money every 30 days.
On top of that, the free case is extremely underwhelming. You can win a ‘random CS2 item’ (again: we found no way of knowing which items are included here), balance, or a random amount of their secondary currency called War Tags.
Naturally, one shouldn’t expect free cases to drop big skins every couple of days, but we opened ours over a dozen times and we had a $0.04 balance as a result on average.
There’s no way to level up your account to get access to other free daily cases either; additional ‘free’ cases are reserved for paying Premium members.
Special Events
Hellcase pretty much always has a special event going on. And these especial events are big. For starters, special events have their own currency in the form of event tokens. Event tokens can be unlocked by playing specific games that have a chance of dropping them. You can then use these tokens in various event-specific games: there’s an event prize wheel, you can spend tokens to generate a random skin, you can exchange tokens for specific skins or site balance, …
In essence, these events are a ‘game within a game’, as there are a ton of options to use your event currencies. This makes events extremely fun and interactive.
Additionally, Hellcase also occasionally offers a crowdfunding case with events. The proceeds of this case (partially) go towards funding various tournaments. These tournaments vary from 1v1 tournaments for FaceIt levels 1-6 to 5v5 tournaments for FaceIt level 6 and up. This kind of integration with the competitive community is something that we can greatly appreciate.
War Tags (Secondary Currency)
War Tags are Hellcase’s ‘secondary currency’. Almost all websites in this genre offer a secondary currency that occasionally gets issued to players and can then be used to open specific cases or what have you, but Hellcase takes it one step further.
With Hellcase’s War Tags, users can open specific War Tag cases, purchase profile backgrounds, and join War Tag giveaways. Unsurprisingly, the cheaper wartag cases have pretty terrible odds and cheaper skins, but the more expensive ones can have decent odds.
In addition to some ‘one and done’ tasks (such as linking an email) to get a couple of War Tags, you can earn them in a variety of ways: from your daily free case, from a failed tradeup attempt, by refilling your account balance, and by having agents raiding. Those first three are pretty standard, but the last method is unusual to say the least.
For website balance, you can buy agents packs. These contain ingame player models that have different ‘raid stats’. The most common agents raid a low amount of War Tags per 24 hours, while the rarer agents raid multiples of those lower tier agents. Once you unlock an agent, you can set them to work, after which you have to collect your War Tags every 24 hours. These War Tags can then be spent in the War Tag shop or in giveaways. Note that agents go away after a while: they won’t be raiding forever.
These War Tags are once again almost a game within a game, but it’s an extremely confusing concept at first that doesn’t get explained properly if you ask us. There are FAQs available, and after doing some digging you kind of know what’s what, but Hellcase could do a better job at explaining this section of the site if you ask us.
Hellcase Free To Play Viability
Hellcase is a pretty good website for free to play players. The free daily case is definitely extremely underwhelming, but luckily there is a variety of extremely cheap cases that you can unbox, so free to play players will almost always have something to do after a couple of days.
There are also free giveways to join almost daily, but joining giveaways isn’t very interactive, and the free giveaways also have terrible odds so we wouldn’t necessarily call this ‘fun’.
The War Tags and events system do make it so that -even if you lose- you’re almost always going to get something to continue playing with as well. This makes Hellcase have a rewarding gameplay loop even when the going gets tough, but you do need to invest a certain sum for this loop to really become active.
If you’re completely free to play you can do a lot worse than Hellcase.
Overall Website Experience
Layout and Performance
Hellcase is by far the most confusing website of its kind that we’ve tested so far. In a way, this is a logical consequence of having so many extra features and functionalities, but we had a rough time getting to grips with the overall layout.
We’re also not fans of how busy the website looks. It’s pretty ‘shouty’, and on a lot of pages there’s a constantly ticking ‘live drops’ section on the left side of the screen. You can toggle this to display the best drops of the past 24 hours (this doesn’t update nearly as often) but having the live drops section as the default got old pretty quickly.
The website and all of its games did run smoothly for all of our testing. The animations aren’t the flashiest or most beautiful, but they do get the job done.
Convenience
As we’ve mentioned in earlier sections of the review, Hellcase isn’t a very convenient website to use. There are a ton of menus to sift through and we found a bunch of options and features that were put in some unintuitive places.
What also doesn’t help is that some things just seem random. In the header, for example, nestled in between permanent games there’s a time-limited event called ‘Dropland’. This is different from the event with event tokens that we discussed earlier on in the review. It’s basically a bunch of case bundles you can purchase for a slight discount. Why this is called an ‘event’ and why it’s situated in the header as if it’s a permanent gamemode is something that eludes us.
Even after hours of testing and familiarizing ourselves with the website, Hellcase remained a confusing and difficult-to-understand experience.
Withdrawing
Withdrawing skins is pretty straightforward. In the event that the website itself doesn’t have the skin that you want or need, you can use a system called Shadowpay. This is basically a P2P marketplace with a pretty decent collection of skins to choose from. If you hit a truly massive jackpot, odds are you won’t be able to withdraw the exact skin you’ve won, but it should be pretty easy to get skins of a corresponding value.
Community
Hellcase has a ‘users online’ counter at the top left of the screen and the aforementioned live drops indicator on the left side of the screen. Other than that there’s no community interaction. There is also no live chat available.
Support
Hellcase does not have live support. For a website as convoluted and elaborate as Hellcase, we find this to be a bummer. Their FAQ section is reasonably well-detailed, and contains most of the information one needs, but it’s always nicer to be able to chat to a real person as opposed to sending an email.
Hellcase Review Conclusion – Is Hellcase Legit?
Hellcase has been around for almost a decade and is a known name in the community. Following that and our testing, we would call Hellcase legit. Do note that this is no guarantee: no one (except for their developers and management) has 100% knowledge of what happens behind the scenes, and even completely legitimate websites can get compromised or bought by malicious individuals. Always play on these websites at your own risk.
With that said: Hellcase is one of the most expansive websites of its kind, but that also makes it one of the most difficult-to-understand websites of its kind. There’s tons of stuff going on, and even if you think you’ve seen it all you’re likely to stumble upon another menu or feature you’ve never seen before. This, combined with the lack of live support, makes Hellcase an experience that’s occasionally frustrating to navigate. Underneath all of that is a vast and very enjoyable website though, so if you can stick through the learning curve there’s lots to love.
