Pirots 3 Demo & review

The third Pirots locks a bandit in a cage beside the grid, and the key that frees him turns an ordinary drop into a duel: he collects gems of any colour until one of the four birds beats him. ELK Studios released Pirots 3 in June 2024, moving the CollectR birds to a Wild West town with trains on the grid's edges and a coin game of lassos and scorpions. It suits players who enjoy reading a busy board more than they mind a low RTP.

The grid before our first drop: four birds, their gems, the caged bandit and several feature symbols. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

How Pirots 3 works

Four birds, red, purple, green and blue, sit among gems of the same colours on a grid of seven rows and six columns. After each drop every bird moves onto each touching gem of its colour, horizontally or vertically, and collects it, along with coins, wilds and every feature symbol it reaches. Each gem pays by its colour and its current level:

Upgrades raise gem levels, so the level a colour reaches matters far more than how many gems a bird picks up. Every gem and wild a bird collects also fills the meter above the grid. A full meter turns three gems into random feature symbols, and up to three of these releases can stack.

The bandit: how he escapes and when he stops

Collect a key and the bandit breaks out of his cage once the birds have finished. He is the one collector who takes any colour: he moves cluster by cluster, picking up gems and feature symbols, and his running total shows on a wanted poster.

• Duels: whenever he stands next to a bird, they fight. A win removes that bird from the round.
• The end: losing a duel ends the escape and pays whatever his poster shows.
• The big finish: beating all four birds lets him collect the whole grid and starts his own coin game.

This is the feature the base game leans on. A bird only ever earns from its own colour, while an escaped bandit can sweep across all four before his first lost duel.

Our Bandit Jailbreak drop ended when the bandit lost his first duel. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

Feature symbols, trains and showdowns

Upgrades and keys carry the game. One raises what every later gem of a colour is worth, the other brings in the only collector that ignores colour. Trains and showdowns mostly reshuffle the board between them.

Bonus and coin game: how they trigger

Three bonus symbols collected in one round give five free drops on the grid as it stands, and every further bonus symbol collected inside the round adds one more. Gem levels and meter progress carry from drop to drop, so an early upgrade pays on every drop after it. The Super Bonus, sold through X-iter, starts on the full 8x7 grid and makes each upgrade lift all four colours at once.

The coin game

Clearing the whole grid starts it, and so does the bandit beating all four birds. Coin bags and scorpions fall onto the board while the birds, or the bandit, ride a train above it and throw lassos. Each bag caught adds to a counter, a scorpion knocks the catcher out, and the counter times the bet is paid at the end. In practice the board decides it: plenty of big bags mean little if the scorpions get hit first.

Our bought coin game: two 500x bags in play, and scorpions among them. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

X-iter: prices and what you get

X-iter is ELK's buy menu and works only in the base game. Two options buy a whole Bonus, two buy a single drop with one feature guaranteed, and Bonus Hunt charges a premium per drop for a better chance of the Bonus.

All five run at the base game's RTP, so the choice is about what each guarantees, not about value. Our pick would be the Bonus, since one price buys five drops in which every upgrade keeps paying.

The X-iter menu priced from our $1.00 bet. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

RTP, volatility and max win

ELK sets one RTP, 94.0%, for the game and every X-iter option, and our demo showed no other version. Most slots we test sit around two points higher. The data sheet rates the volatility 8 of 10, which the table above shows as high, and payouts stop at 10,000x the bet.

Our Pirots 3 demo test

The bandit made the base game. He escaped on six spins, and those rounds paid $62.10 between them, more than all the other spins combined. Away from him, most wins landed between 30 cents and $1.50.

The one natural Bonus, on spin 50, paid modestly and ended with a 1000x coin bag still on the board, out of every bird's reach. The bought rounds swung widely. The Super Bonus came back just above its price, almost entirely from one collect step of $500.10 in its first drop, while every bird in the bought coin game hit a scorpion before a bag. These were played in a fresh session after the base spins, each session balancing on its own, and a handful of rounds cannot measure any of them. A bandit win over all four birds and a MAX WIN coin both stayed out of our session, so those come from the help screens.

Our natural Bonus settled at 21.05, with a 1000x bag no bird reached. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

Our bought Super Bonus ended at 509.30 after five free drops. FluxPlays demo test, 1 November 2026.

Is Pirots 3 worth playing?

If you already like the Pirots birds, yes: the bandit is the best idea the series has added to its base game, a collector that ignores colour and has to fight his way across the board. If the RTP is the first thing you check, the answer does not change with any X-iter option, because every one of them shares the same low figure.

What changed in the series

Pick Pirots for the simplest board, or Pirots 5 if you want CollectR at a higher RTP. Stay with Pirots 3 when you want the bandit's escapes and duels on top of the birds.

In the demo, buy one Bandit Jailbreak drop first. It shows how far the bandit gets before a duel stops him, for a quarter of the Bonus price.