My wife and I used a bunch of Fail Safes back when they were available, in .270, 7mm, .30 and .338. They usually worked very well, being easy to get to shoot and penetrating very similarly to Barnes X's.
But once in a while one would fail to expand much or at all, which can also happen with hollow-point X's, and the problem seemed to get worse toward the end of the Fail Safe's production life. You might want to shoot a couple into wet newspaper as a test, because wet paper is far more gentle on bullets than dry paper. If they don't expand well in wet paper, they might not expand on broadside rib shots.
A friend of mine who has shot a boatload of deer tried the Failsafe (150 grain in 308 Win. IIRC) for a while and said he got more runners than he was accustomed to. He went back to vanilla cup and cores for that application.
