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So, I spent my evening spinning ELK Studios’ new Pirots 4, and I have mixed feelings.
When you first load up the game, it hits you with this really cool hologram lobby asking you to pick your world: Space, Ice, or Fire. It feels like you’re getting three games in one, and it isn’t pure theatre: each world swaps two of the five buy options and brings its own coin game. What it doesn’t change is the math underneath. It runs on a 94% RTP (Return to Player) and has a 10,000x max win, the exact same numbers as Pirots 3. Honestly, if you care about your return rate, Pirots 5 is already out and runs at 96%. I spent my time in the Space world, which is the one the game shipped with.
The “So Close Yet So Far” Gameplay
At first glance, it looks like one of those standard grid slots where clusters pay out, but it’s actually a collector game. You’ve got four little parrots in spacesuits dropping onto a 6×6 grid. They only eat gems of their own color, and only if those gems land directly next to them. When they eat, they move into the empty space and keep eating, pulling new symbols down.
The payouts vary wildly. A basic red gem pays out a measly tenth of your bet, while top-tier gems can hit 30x. There are also coins scattered around worth anywhere from 1x to 2,500x.
But here is the absolute most frustrating part of the game: adjacency. You can have a board completely flooded with high-paying red gems, but if the red bird is blocked by another color or an empty space, you win absolutely zero. It’s agonizing to look at. To hit that big 10,000x max win, you need these birds to navigate a very rigid, stubborn grid.
They Quietly Downgraded the Good Stuff
If you played Pirots 3, you are going to notice a bunch of sneaky little downgrades. Sure, there are a few new gimmicks, the peanut is now a “spacecorn,” and occasionally a black hole swallows the board and spits the symbols back out in a new order.
But the tools you actually need to win are worse now. Pirots 3 gave us an amazing wild symbol that always copied the best-paying gem on the board. In this game? Gone. You just get a basic, boring wild. Also, the coin ladder now starts at a miserable 1x instead of 2x.
I spent most of my base game watching these birds eat three or four cheap gems just to hand me back pennies. Out of about 25 spins, maybe a third of them paid out anything, and most of those didn’t even cover the cost of my bet. At one point, I just sat there staring at a wild and a coin that went completely untouched because the birds were trapped.
The Sneaky, Greedy Bonus Meter
Above the board, there’s a meter that tracks what the birds eat. Fill it up (which takes 20 symbols in the base game), and it drops a feature symbol.
But getting into the actual free spins is brutal. You have to get the birds to eat three bonus skulls in a single spin. Because the board resets after every spin, this is incredibly hard. In one round, a “super skull” landed right next to a 5x coin, but my birds couldn’t reach it. The spin ended, the board wiped, and that was that.
And if you do manage to trigger the bonus, the meter gets greedy without telling you. You fill it at 20 symbols. Then the next time, it secretly wants 30. Then 40. Then 50. Pirots 3 was a flat 15 in the base game and 30 in the bonus. Here, you’re paying a steep “inflation tax” the longer your bonus round goes, and the game’s interface gives you zero warning that the goalposts are moving.
Buying the Bonus: A Warning
I decided to test out the X-iter buy menu to see if throwing money at the game made it better. I bought the 50x “Lost in Space” coin feature. The board expands to a full 8×8, puts a bird in each corner, and rains down coins. It looks like you’re about to win a fortune.
The reality? That adjacency trap ruins it. My board filled halfway with gold coins, but my birds were trapped in their corners and couldn’t reach them. I took a heavy loss on that buy. I also bought the standard 100x free drops. The board stayed at a base 6×6, the gems stayed at level one, and I lost money on that, too.
The Verdict
The only time Pirots 4 actually feels incredible is if you shell out for the 500x Super Bonus. It instantly maxes the board to 8×8, and every upgrade symbol boosts all four colors at once. The screen fills with gold gems and huge coins. It is an absolute spectacle and super fun to watch.
But guess what? Even on that premium 500x buy, I still ended up in the red.
Pirots 4 is a polished, beautiful game to look at. But underneath the fancy holograms, it’s a sequel that stripped out the best features of the last game, lowered the payouts, and built a sneaky bonus meter that actively works against you the longer you play. Play it for the visuals if you want, but keep your expectations (and your wallet) in check.
