Pirots 4: honest review, the CollectR mechanic and the 94% RTP problem

The Pirots series is the most ambitious thing ELK Studios has built, and Pirots 4, released in 2025, is the chapter where the studio pushed the idea to its limit: pirate parrots on a space adventure chasing a monster, on a grid that refuses to stay still. There are no paylines and no clusters in the classic sense — there are birds moving across the board collecting gems of their own colour.

It is a genuinely different game from everything filling the lobbies, and worth knowing for that alone. But there is one number on the spec sheet that cannot be swept under the rug: the default RTP is 94%, and that is low. Not “slightly below average”: low.

Is Pirots 4 worth playing?

It is for you if what you want from a slot is mechanics rather than efficiency. Pirots 4 has more ideas per spin than most games have in an entire catalogue, and there is real pleasure in watching a spin unfold in stages. If you play short, occasional sessions for the spectacle more than the return, 94% hurts less than it looks.

It is not for you if you play regularly and pay attention to expected cost. At a 94% default RTP, every euro you stake costs you on average roughly double what it would on a 96.5% slot — and that adds up fast. It is also not for anyone who wants to understand what is happening on the first try: the rule density is high and the opening spins are spent decoding the screen.

CollectR: winning without paylines

Forget everything you know about patterns and positions. The grid holds birds, each with its own colour, and what matters is the relationship between them and the gems: each bird collects the gems matching its colour. Every collection feeds the progress of the spin, frees space on the board and sets up further collections.

So a spin here is not a result, it is a process. The opening screen tells you very little: what counts is the chain that follows, how many gems each bird manages to pick up and what that unlocks. The design sits closer to a puzzle solving itself than to a traditional slot — and that is the whole reason the series exists.

The grid that grows from 6×6 to 8×8

The second engine is the board itself. Pirots 4 starts at 6×6 and can expand to 8×8 during a spin. That is not cosmetic: more positions means more symbols in play, more gems available to collect and more room for collection chains to keep running.

In practice it is the escalation mechanism of the slot. The spins worth anything are almost always the ones where the grid grew — the ones stuck at 6×6 die quickly. It also explains the distribution: plenty of short, inconsequential spins and a handful of long ones that carry everything.

The price of such a rich mechanic

Here is the trade that defines this game. All that complexity — the collecting, the grid expansion, the layers of events — has to be paid for somewhere in the maths, and it was paid for in RTP. The 94% of Pirots 4 sits about two and a half points below the market standard, which runs between 96% and 96.5%.

It is worth translating that instead of leaving it as an abstract percentage. At 96.5% RTP, the house edge is 3.5%. At 94%, it is 6%. That is close to double the expected cost on every euro you spin. Over a short session you will not notice — nothing is noticeable over a short session, that is the nature of variance. Over a few hundred spins, it is very noticeable.

We are not saying it is a bad game: it is an expensive one. Those are different things, and the call is yours as long as the number is on the table.

Symbols and features

We do not publish a per-symbol value table. ELK Studios ships configurations of the same title and the exact paytable depends on the build your casino runs — giving you numbers that might not match your screen would be worse than giving none. What can be described safely is the structure:

Element	How it works
Grid	Starts at 6×6 and expands up to 8×8 during the spin
Paylines	None — the game does not pay for patterns
CollectR mechanic	Each bird collects the gems matching its own colour
Spin rhythm	Resolves in chained phases, not as a single outcome
Volatility	High — value is concentrated in the spins that escalate
Default RTP	94%, below the market average
Max win	10000× your bet
Minimum bet	0.20

Note: 94% is the default RTP published by ELK Studios and it is, frankly, a low figure — the market reference sits between 96% and 96.5%. As with any provider, casinos can run different configurations of the same game, so check the number in the info panel inside the slot before you bet: here it could be lower still. And remember RTP is an average over millions of spins — it says nothing about your session today, only about what that session costs on average.

Pirots 4 vs the competition

Slot	Default RTP	Volatility	Max win	Note
Pirots 4	94%	High	10000×	CollectR, grid from 6×6 to 8×8, no paylines
Book of Ra deluxe	95.1%	High	5000×	2008 classic, also below today’s average
Le Bandit	96.34%	Medium	10000×	Same ceiling, 2.34 points more RTP and less variance
Wanted Dead or a Wild	96.38%	High	12500×	Hacksaw, 15 fixed paylines and DuelReels
Sweet Bonanza	96.48%	Medium-high	21100×	Pay anywhere, the tallest ceiling in this table
Gates of Olympus	96.5%	High	5000×	Pay anywhere with tumble and multiplier orbs
Buffalo King Megaways	96.52%	High	5000×	Megaways, up to 200,704 ways to win

The table is unkind to Pirots 4 and there is no softening it: it has the lowest default RTP on this list, and the Le Bandit comparison is the uncomfortable one — exactly the same 10000× ceiling, 2.34 more points of default RTP and medium instead of high volatility. On expected cost per spin, there is no argument.

What the table cannot show is the one thing Pirots 4 has that the others do not: the mechanic. None of the slots above does what it does. If that is what you are after, play it knowing the price; if you want the best return per euro, any row below it here serves you better.

Bankroll tips

At 94% RTP with high volatility, your balance is attacked from two sides at once — and there is only one right answer: stake less per spin than you would on any other game. If a 96.5% slot would justify 100 comfortable spins, plan for considerably more here, because the average cost of each one is higher.

Set your session limit before you open the game, never in the middle of a dry run. And do not raise your stake after a string of dead spins to “make it back”: the slot has no memory of what happened, you do. If your casino offers free play in the lobby, ten minutes there really are worth it before depositing: at this rule density, that is the minimum needed just to understand what you are looking at.