Pirots X slot shows you its tricks before you spin. In place of a static splash screen, the opening plays each headline feature as a little animation, one at a time, under the logo. The multiplier ticks up, the grid spreads, wilds merge and split. Four pirate parrots perch above a 5×5 grid and act the game out in front of you, flying down to collect their colours, lobbing bombs that blow the board wider, cracking open treasure chests mid-round. The CollectR mechanic that runs the rest of the series has the birds eating matching gems for the win. In X, they collect for the multiplier, and clusters do the paying.
The 4 parrots, one in each colour, sit on a perch above the reels, with the round’s global multiplier shown on the sign behind them. When a nest lands, a bird drops onto it and starts collecting symbols that match its colour once the win has been counted. Each low gem it takes pushes that global multiplier up by 1 and each high owl by 2, so a bird on a crowded grid can build the multiplier fast. Birds can’t collect wilds or feature symbols (the game’s tool symbols, from bombs and nests to the bonus and super-bonus anchors), and a bird steps away once it has collected at least 1 symbol, or when a bomb scares it off.
X pays in clusters, but the birds, the nests and the colour-matched collecting carry over from the series, and the growing grid is an old Pirots habit. Meteors did the expanding in Pirots 2, dynamite in Pirots 3, and bombs handle it here.
A winning cluster drops a wild into one of the spaces its symbols just cleared. Two things can then happen to those wilds. Several landing in one winning cluster merge into a single multiplier wild. Its number is the sum of the wilds that went in, a plain wild counting as 1, so 2 plain wilds joining a x2 multiplier wild make a x4. A wild touching more than one winning cluster at once does the opposite and splits, handing a wild to each. Both a plain wild and a multiplier wild stand in for any paying symbol, though never for a nest, bomb, bonus, super-bonus or free-drop symbol.
Every drop begins with the 4 birds back at the top, and from there the game can throw in any of three things at random.
Charlie, the little parakeet riding the red parrot’s shoulder, can also spring a bomb of his own at the very end of a round.
Three bonus symbols landing in normal play trigger bonus mode and 5 free drops, with the global multiplier now holding its value from one free drop to the next instead of resetting. Extra free drop symbols top the count back up. The higher tier needs a super bonus symbol alongside 2 bonus symbols, and it plays out on a grid expanded to its limit, with a chest guaranteed at the start of every free drop, so the feature releases come thick and fast.
For anyone who doesn’t want to wait for a trigger, the X-iter buy menu offers 5 ways in, priced from 3x to 500x your bet. Each sells a different slice of the game.
A spin begins a round, the symbols fall in drops, and as long as wins or bombs keep coming, new drops follow inside that round. Wins come from clusters, not lines. Land at least 5 matching symbols connected side-to-side or stacked upwards and they pay, and when a run of them joins up, only the largest cluster in that group is counted. Because a big symbol fills several spaces at once, it counts as all the 1×1 positions it covers.
The action is easy to follow, the arithmetic less so, and an example helps. A cluster of 9 red gems pays $0.45 at a $1.00 spin. If a x2 multiplier wild is one of those 9, the cluster pays $0.90, and with the round’s global multiplier sitting at x5 it pays $4.50. The wild multiplies first, then the global multiplier applies on top.
The return sits at 94%, and Pirots X plays high on volatility, so all that on-screen action doesn’t map neatly onto the payouts. A spin can be set between $0.20 and $100.00, worth 100 coins if you switch the display over in the settings, and wins top out at 10,000x the bet.
Figures shown for the $1.00 spins we ran for this review, banded by cluster count.
| Owl (high) | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10-12 | 13-15 | 16+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red | $1.00 | $1.25 | $1.50 | $1.75 | $2.50 | $5.00 | $10.00 | $50.00 |
| Purple | $0.50 | $0.60 | $0.70 | $0.80 | $1.50 | $3.00 | $5.00 | $25.00 |
| Green | $0.40 | $0.50 | $0.60 | $0.70 | $1.00 | $2.00 | $4.00 | $20.00 |
| Blue | $0.30 | $0.40 | $0.50 | $0.60 | $0.75 | $1.50 | $3.00 | $15.00 |
| Gem (low) | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10-12 | 13-15 | 16+ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red | $0.25 | $0.30 | $0.35 | $0.40 | $0.45 | $0.90 | $2.00 | $10.00 |
| Purple | $0.20 | $0.25 | $0.30 | $0.35 | $0.40 | $0.80 | $1.75 | $8.00 |
| Green | $0.15 | $0.20 | $0.25 | $0.30 | $0.35 | $0.70 | $1.50 | $6.00 |
| Blue | $0.10 | $0.15 | $0.20 | $0.25 | $0.30 | $0.60 | $1.25 | $4.00 |
Pirots X puts the whole round on screen. You see which symbols each bird takes and the multiplier sign move as it takes them, so nothing about a win is guesswork. The pirate scene around the grid does more than decorate it, with cleared cells opening onto the lagoon and a voice calling out over the music. Clusters do the paying and the birds only feed the multiplier, so there is less to learn before the first spin makes sense. The return is a fixed 94%, and the buys run up to 500x, which is a lot to stake on one drop.
The presentation is the strongest part of it. The game builds a full pirate scene around the grid, and it holds the demo together across a long session. The X-iter menu is the other plus, with cheap doors at the bottom that let you sample the bigger features for a few dollars.
What it can’t do is make the payouts match the noise. A busy grid of wilds, merges and collecting birds will often settle for a couple of dollars. Its high-volatility swings run wide, so a calm-looking round can pay as much as a frantic one. The top X-iter door is the clearest case of it: our 500x super bonus ran every feature the game has and paid $324.35 back against the $500.00 it cost.
Start with what’s around the reels, because the pirate scene does more work here than most. The grid sits on a wooden frame planted on a beach, a turquoise lagoon beyond it, kegs stacked in the corners and rocky cliffs rising on either side. Clear a cluster and the emptied cells briefly reveal the island through the gap. A pirate laughs off to the side and calls out over the music, an “ahoy my matey” here, a “more hands on deck” there, and it keeps the demo feeling alive between drops. The animated intro sets all of this up before you’ve staked a coin.
The parrots are where the round takes shape. Each one flies down to a nest and gathers its colour in front of you, and the number on the multiplier sign moves as it works. Two spins in, a bomb from the blue parrot went off next to the green one and left it singed and blinking. That showed a rule in passing. A bomb can scare a bird off its nest. That same early run had the purple parrot collect a clutch of its own symbols, the multiplier doubled it, and a fairly quiet-looking grid paid $4.90.
That $4.90 says plenty about the game. One drop can fill with bombs, merging wilds and 3 birds collecting at once, and the number at the end is often smaller than the fuss suggests. A later round had 3 birds down on their nests at the same time, Charlie throwing a bomb from the red parrot’s shoulder, and a multiplier that finished on x13. It paid $2.50. It is never dull to watch, but a run that looks like it should pay big frequently doesn’t.
The X-iter menu sells tickets to those set pieces. The bottom three cost 3x, 5x and 25x your stake. We took the Big Symbol door a few times, and it paid $6.40 on one run with 2 birds flying to their nests, and $12.50 on another as the green and pink parrots settled in. The Feature Release door was the best of them. The green bird cracked a chest and 5 spawned across the grid. A super win banner flashed up at $42.00, wilds merged, and the blue and red parrots dropped in to take the round to $51.90.
Both bonus tiers are the presentation at its largest. The standard bonus, taken through the $100 Bonus option, ran to $89.65. The third free drop was the one that made it, with the green and red parrots both collecting their colours, a bomb widening the grid to 6×6, and multiplier wilds and a merge stacking around $50 onto the total in one drop. The super bonus, bought for 500x, starts at 7×7 and hands you a chest every drop. Ours went from a x15 multiplier at the third drop through an EPIC WIN of $82.50, the game’s win-tier banner rather than its Epic symbol size, and on past x30 to x32 as the parrots kept collecting. It finished at $324.35, short of the 500x it cost.
A couple of settings deserve a mention. Quick Play speeds the staging up without cutting any of it, so the birds still fly and the bombs still go off, just faster, which is useful after a few plays of the unhurried version. You can mute the music and the sound effects separately, though we left both on for every session, since the pirate calling out over the music is a fair part of what you are here for.
