Pirots 2 Slot Review

The first Pirots was the biggest hit ELK Studios ever had; Pirots 2 followed it in November 2023 with the same four parrots, the same 94.0% RTP, the same 10,000x ceiling, and a bigger board. The grid starts at 6x6 and grows to 8x8. There are no paylines, because wins come from four coloured birds walking the grid and picking up amber symbols of their own colour, one price per symbol. Volatility is 8 out of 10.

The thing to understand before the first spin is that the base game remembers nothing. Every spin - the game calls one a drop - begins on the small grid with every colour at its lowest value, whatever the previous drop built. Four of our five base drops collected nothing at all. The bonus is the exact opposite: grid size, symbol values, meter progress, and bonus-symbol count all carry from one free drop to the next, which is why the whole game lives in there and why the buy menu has five prices on it.

Four parrots land on the 6x6 board along with the symbols. Each owns a colour - red, purple, green, or blue - and collects only ambers of that colour, plus any feature symbol regardless of colour. The one rule that decides everything is adjacency: a bird takes a symbol directly above, below, or beside it, never diagonally. A bird that lands with nothing matching next to it just stands there. If all four do, the drop is over before anything has moved.

When a bird does have something to take, it keeps going. It walks from amber to amber, the collected ones vanish, the survivors fall, new symbols drop in from above, and the birds go again until nobody can reach anything. They take their turns by value, the richest colour first. Each collected amber pays on its own, no cluster sizes and no line counts, just a price per symbol at whatever level that colour has reached. Red at level 1 pays 0.1x the stake per symbol; the same red at level 7 pays 50x. Blue runs from 0.05x to 10x. Every colour climbs seven steps; every step is gone when the drop ends.

That is the whole base game. It plays exactly as it sounds. Our five drops at a 2.00 stake went like this: four collected nothing; on the second the green bird took six greens while the purple bird took three purples, for 1.20. The hit rate is 25.4%, so one paying drop in five is the game being itself rather than unlucky. Le King, Hacksaw's collector on a cluster grid, hits 41.33% of the time under a 20,000x ceiling; this one asks you to sit through a great deal more silence for half the top prize.

Everything that turns a drop into more than a few coins comes from the eight feature symbols. There are eight, drawn as objects on the board: a coin, a wild, an arrowhead that raises one colour by one to three levels, a second arrowhead that raises all four at once, a mushroom that recolours a cluster next to the bird into that bird's colour, a tub of popcorn that lets each bird cross an empty space once, an egg that hatches a dinosaur and scatters the birds to new positions, and a red DON'T PRESS button that calls a meteor. Any bird collects any of them.

The red button is the only way the grid grows. The meteor clears the ambers around it, the board refills, and the grid adds a row and a column, 6x6 to 7x7 to 8x8. More cells means more symbols within reach and more room for a bird to keep walking.

Above the board runs the CollectR meter; it counts only ambers and wilds, never feature symbols. It takes 20 collected ambers to fill on the starting grid, more once the grid has grown. A full meter turns three ambers on the board into random feature symbols, with up to three of those releases able to stack. So the meter fills fastest on drops that are already paying, while a board full of features does nothing for it.

The birds also have two tricks for a board that looks finished. Two adjacent birds may swap places, but only if the swap opens something up; three in a row start a fight that wipes a random patch of ambers and grabs any coin, egg, skull, or red button in its path before the birds land somewhere new. Both fire only when nothing is left to collect, which makes them rescue mechanics rather than payouts.

Three bonus symbols - gold dinosaur skulls - collected in one drop open five free drops. It is the same game with the resets switched off: the grid stays whatever size the meteors made it, every colour keeps its level, the meter keeps its progress. Skulls collected inside the bonus count towards the next three, which add five more drops.

We never triggered it from the base game; both entries came from the Bonus purchase at 100x the stake. The first, 200.00 at a 2.00 stake, turned into the version of this game everyone is chasing. By the third free drop the grid was 8x8 and every amber on it wore a crown, which means all four colours at level 7, with 168.10 on the win counter. The round closed at 172.90. A maxed board is still a board where the birds have to land next to their colour; on the last two drops they mostly did not.

The second, 1,000.00 at a 10.00 stake, got two skulls towards a retrigger and stopped there; it paid 549.00. Neither round found the third skull, so neither ran past its five drops.

The ceiling is 10,000x - 1,000,000 at the 100.00 top stake - and the round stops the moment it is reached. There are two roads to it. The slow one is the crowned 8x8 board from the previous section with the red bird walking through reds at 50x apiece. The fast one is a single tile. Coins carry values of 5, 10, 25, 50, 100, 500, or 1000 times the stake; one of them says MAX WIN instead. A bird that collects it is paid whatever is left between the round's total and the cap, on the spot. We did not see one. What we did see was a 100x coin sitting on a base-game board with no bird within reach of it, which is the same rule from the other side.

The Super Bonus at 500x the stake is the mode built for the ceiling. Its five drops start at 8x8 instead of growing there; every upgrade symbol raises all four colours instead of one. Ours cost 1,000.00 at a 2.00 stake, ran its five drops without a retrigger, and returned 577.90; the last drop alone put an EPIC WIN banner on screen for 226.40. That is the best of the three purchases by a distance and still short of its price.

Five prices - 3x, 10x, 25x, 100x, and 500x the stake - of which only the two dearest buy a bonus. Bonus Hunt at 3x is one drop with quadruple the chance of collecting three skulls; Popcorn Fiesta at 10x is one drop with popcorn already laid; Maximum Grid Size at 25x is one drop played at 8x8. All five run at the same 94.0% as an ordinary spin, which is unusual. In most games the buy costs a point or two of RTP; here it costs nothing but the price.

The parrots have left the pirate ship for a theme park overrun by dinosaurs: a lake with a triceratops drinking on the far bank, a roller coaster threading the canopy, a tyrannosaur leaning in from the right once the grid has grown. It is Jurassic Park with parrots; even the score swells the way that film's does. The symbols hang in open air with no frame around them, which is what lets the grid change size without the picture moving. The ambers are teardrops with an insect trapped inside; each grows a small gold crown as its level rises, so a board covered in crowns is the clearest signal the game gives that a drop is worth something. Feature symbols are objects rather than icons - the popcorn tub, the mushroom, the red button on its plinth - and you can read a board at a glance. Inside the bonus the light turns golden.

One complaint. The intro cartoon - the birds worn out after 10,000 days of the Pirots show, a telescope, a roller coaster, a title card for DinoLand - runs about forty seconds before the first drop; we found no way to skip it.

Pirots 2 is the second of six games in the series. The first Pirots, from March 2023, ran on a 5x5 grid at the same 94.00% and the same 10,000x, hit 26.80% of the time, and is the game in the family we rate highest, at 9 out of 10. The sequel's real change is not the dinosaurs. In the original, feature symbols the meter had earned were lost if the bonus triggered before they landed; here they are held and released on the first free drop. Anyone who ground a meter full in the first game and watched it vanish will know why that matters. Pirots 5, from June 2026, is the one member of the line that moved off 94%, to 96.00%. Concrete Cowboys, ELK's later collector with the same growing grid, sits at 96.00% as well.

Neither the RTP nor the growing board is this game's own idea. Ninety-four is the studio's habitual figure - about half of everything ELK makes sits on it and nothing sits below - and an expanding grid turns up in more than a third of its games.

For

• The bonus keeps everything: grid size, all four symbol levels, meter progress, and the count towards five more drops.
• A MAX WIN coin pays the rest of 10,000x in one tile, so the ceiling does not depend on grinding a board to level 7.
• Five buy prices from 3x, all at the base game's own 94.0%.
• The crowns on the ambers tell you the state of the board without reading a number.

Against

• 94.0% on every mode, the same figure the first game shipped with.
• Four of five base drops did nothing at all; by design, the base game cannot carry anything across spins.
• The 100x Bonus purchase came back short of its price both times we bought it, once with the board fully crowned.
• A forty-second intro with no skip we could find.

The Super Bonus is where the ceiling lives, five drops at 8x8 from the first with every upgrade lifting all four colours at once; ours still came back short of its 500x price. Judge the game on the bonus, because there is nothing else to judge: the base game is a run of self-contained drops that either catch or die on landing; four of ours died. When a drop catches it is genuinely something, a long chain of collections, refills, meteors, and crowns that can run for a minute on one stake; when it does not, the round is over before the birds have blinked. Whether that is worth 94.0% is a question this studio has been asked for years and keeps answering by shipping the same figure. Anyone who played the first Pirots and lost a full meter to a badly timed trigger gets that fixed here, on a board two rows bigger, at the same 10,000x.