Pirots X

Pirots X: Slot Overview

Aarrrgharkkk! Sorry, just trying to use letters to transition from a pirate's exclamation to a parrot's squawk there. The reason why is we are setting sail with ELK Studios in the team's online slot, Pirots X. The original Pirots slot was a mashup of pirates and parrots, hence the game title, and featured 4 cute birdies charging around the reels collecting winning symbols courtesy of a clever CollectR mechanic. It really was quite unique and was followed by the dinosaur-themed Pirots 2, then the Western-themed Pirots 3. Pirots X, meanwhile, is quite different in that it shrugs off the CollectR mechanic, which, seeing as this was one of the core centralities of the previous slots, is a bold move. Has it paid off?

For the base and bonus game, players and the four birds find themselves in a rocky ravine, where a river leads out to sea, in a spot thick with plant life and dotted with treasure chests. The main characters have retained their pirate appearances, so at a guess, purely speculative; it feels like they're either about to dig a hole to hide treasure or they've followed a map to the hiding place and are about to excavate their loot. For players' sake, let's hope the game is in the digging up and revealing of treasure mood rather than hiding it deep in the dirt.

After picking a stake of 20 c to $/€100 per drop and hitting the play button, symbols drop into a 5x5 gaming area, which can grow up to 7x7 via certain features. Instead of watching Pirots wander around the reels collecting pay symbols, Pirots X is a more conventional cluster pays slot instead. It's also highly volatile and comes with an RTP of 94% when playing regularly or when taking a punt with X-iter feature buys.

Low-value symbols in Pirots X are 4 gems coloured blue, green, purple and red to match the birds, while the high pays are blue, green, purple, and red birds. A 5-symbol cluster pays 0.1 to 1 times the bet, whereas a 16+ cluster is worth 4x to 50x. Low value, high value, and regular wilds exist in 1x1, 2x2 Super, 3x3 Mega, and 4x4 Epic sizes. Empty spaces below big symbols are filled with 1x1 sized symbols of the same type.

Pirots X: Slot Features

In a major departure from Pirots slots that relied on the CollectR mechanic to create wins, Pirots X is a cluster pays game. Winning clusters of 5 or more vertically or horizontally connected matching symbols form winning clusters. Winning symbols are removed, and a wild symbol is placed in one of the empty spaces before symbols drop down to fill the rest. Cascading continues until a new win fails to appear. Other features of Pirots include bombs, feature chests, big symbol drops, wild symbols, the bonus game, the super bonus game, and X-iter buys.

The Pirots

Instead of being on the grid throughout the game, the Pirots, this time, sit at the top of the reels. If a nest symbol is present (by a drop or a feature release), a random bird flies down to settle on it. From the nest, Pirots can collect symbols of the same colour as the bird after the win evaluation. Each collected symbol increases the global multiplier by +1 for lows, +2 for highs, which is applied to all wins. Birds cannot collect feature symbols or wilds, and they leave the grid when they have collected at least one symbol or are scared off by a bomb. Birds perform their collection before the bonus starts if a bonus is triggered on the same drop. Birds drop in at the top of the grid at the beginning of the next drop if crushed by a crushing big symbol, burned by an exploding bomb, or if they do not collect any symbols.

Features

The Pirots at the top of the reels may randomly trigger features - bomb, feature release, and big drop. The bomb feature releases a bomb onto the reels, which explodes, removing all close proximity symbols except feature symbols, causing a redrop. The explosion also expands the game grid up to a max of 7x7. Charlie the parakeet may randomly activate the bomb feature at the end of a game round.

The feature release triggers at random at the start of a drop or free drop by a bird opening a chest. This replaces a number of 1x1 symbols with random feature symbols. This does not affect feature symbols or birds. A feature release can place wilds, bombs, nests, scatter or super scatter symbols. In free spins, free drop symbols may be placed.

The big drop drops a big symbol the same colour as the triggering bird, crushing 1x1 symbols on its way down the grid. Symbols of the same type and feature symbols are not affected. Big symbols count as the number of positions they cover.

Wild Symbols

The wild symbol counts as any regular paying symbols to help complete or improve winning clusters. Wild symbols connected to multiple winning clusters, split and award 1 wild symbol for each cluster. Several wild symbols in a winning cluster merge into a multiplier wild, which has a value equal to the number of contributing wild symbols. Winning clusters are multiplied by all connected multiplier wilds, as well as the global multiplier.

Bonus

• Regular Bonus Game - Hitting 3 bonus scatter symbols triggers the bonus game. The global multiplier is persistent between drops in the bonus game. Landing the free drops symbols awards extra free spins.
• Super Bonus - The super bonus is triggered by landing 2 bonus scatters and 1 super bonus scatter. This feature is played on the maximum grid size. All free spins in the super bonus start with a guaranteed feature chest.

X-iter

Pirots X's X-iter feature buy section contains these: Bonus Hunt - more than triple the chance of triggering a bonus game at the cost of 3x the bet per spin, Big Symbol - drops a guaranteed big symbol on a 6x6 grid for 5x the bet, Feature Release - buys a game round on the maximum grid size with a guaranteed feature release of 3 to 5 symbols and a guaranteed super bonus if a bonus is triggered for 25x the bet, Bonus Game - 100x the bet, and Super Bonus Game - 500x the bet.

Pirots X: Slot Verdict

First off, Pirots X is a solid cluster paying slot. ELK Studios has proven they can make good ones; see Propaganda, for example, and the team has made another good one here. Pirots accompanies the cluster wins with a flurry of features that complement the flow of the game, and there's a chunky 10,000x the bet max win to aim for. No max win coins or anything like that either, just the core mechanics on hand to potentially (or not) achieve the top sum. With the chance to double up multipliers - wild multipliers backed by global multipliers, you can, in theory, see how it might be done. So, on paper and in practice, Pirots X is a well-designed cluster slot holding a batch of tricks on hand to amuse players.

And yet, excising the CollectR mechanic means Pirots X provides a more common ride than the other Pirots slots do. Hints of the mechanic have been crossed over, such as when birds land in nests and gobble symbols to increase the global multiplier, meaning there is a link. The birds themselves are another obvious link. However, if ELK Studios had used a different set of characters and given the game a different title, would anyone have spotted the connections to a Pirots slot? Maybe, debatable.

Ah well, they did, and maybe we shouldn't be too hard on a studio willing to fork away from a successful formula to try different things. There's quite a potpourri of ELK ideas happening here, and playing spot the link to other games, such as big symbols from Gold games or wild multiplier converges from Propaganda, was amusing. In the end, Pirots X turned out to be a well-constructed cluster slot with a strong set of features that are capable of pouring in modifiers from multiple angles to chain together gripping sequences of events.