Pirate Radio Slot Review

How to play Pirate Radio mobile slot

Taking a more literal meaning to the term ‘pirate station’, in the Pirate Radio slot you’ll be sailing the seven seas with a crew of headphone wearing, dancing buccaneers. Like all good pirates, you’ll need their trust built over time to get to their golden treasure.

“What shall we do with the drunken sailor… early in the morning!” Though you will never be able to get that song out of your head for the rest of the day, the variety of little tunes to accompany Pirate Radio mobile slot fit this video slot perfectly. Perky and clappy, it will be instantly familiar to any one who’s ever watched a pirate cartoon in their youth.

It works with the theme, which is more Treasure Island than Pirates of the Caribbean. On bigger screens such as iPads or Android tablets, it’s all wooden panelling, barrels, pistols and rope (see images below). We actually prefer the smaller mobile phone version, which has a midnight sea setting, that brings out the vibrancy of the colours on the reels. Still, which ever technology you choose, trust that this slot game will work, as Realistic Gaming mobile slots are purpose built for handheld devices.

Not an easy treasure to capture

The return to player rate on this mobile slot is a fairly low 95.20%. The reason for this is that this slot game is in the higher end of the volatility scale and has a max payout of 40,000x your bet per line. That’s big for a slot that comes across as all fun and games, but actually has a knife at your throat the whole time.

Not to say it’s not worth playing, just that you’ll need to know how to budget to hit a jackpot. The the free spins hit every 50 to 100 spins or so, and though you can get a multiplier up to 6x your bet, expect to walk away with more like 15 to 20 times your bet after the round. The big draw here is those five wilds in a row and the pirate bonus, which is more free spins at a higher value. However, guess how often we’ve seen either of those features? Once – and that was the pirate bonus.

Still… we liked it. It won’t revolutionise slot playing and it could have done with giving us more hope for that jackpot, but it looks great on mobile. For some high sea and high risk thrills we could see ourselves having a little play or two when the mood hits us. A higher max jackpot, even, would have added an extra star.

Bonus Features

Wilds: The headphone wearing skull and cross bone is the wild and offers a potential 40,000 times your bet if you hit five in a row. Dreams aside, this wild shows up often enough during the base game to help your budget stretch a little further.

Scatters & Free Spins: The gold treasure chest is the scatter symbol and you'll need three or more to trigger the free spin bonus round. The more you get, in our experience, the higher the chance of a bigger multiplier and bigger wins.

You'll find two spinning record players which you have to press 'stop' to see the results. One will give you the number of free spins (from 5 to 25), the other the multiplier (from 2 to 6). Most of the time we got about 12/14 free spins with a 3x or 4x multiplier. Not to bad and comes around frequently to help with the budgeting.

Pirate Bonus Round: Almost as elusive as that five of a kind wild, you'll need a five of a kind of any of the three main pirates (the purple captain, the red gun wielding lady or the blue DJ pirate) to trigger this bonus feature. Here you'll be taken to the pirate bonus reels and given 10 free spins. If you are not playing the full 20 paylines, this game will activate them all - but of course, we always play all paylines (and so should you) so this is more of a footnote.

On these reels, if any of the main pirates (purple, red or blue) show up on a payline, you'll get a winning line. It's a mix and match colourful pirate world. Some very decent wins for the taking, but so seldom does it come, you'll be just as lucky to find an actual treasure map and go searching.

Pirate Radio Review Conclusion

We get that that Pirate bonus round and the five wilds are the equivalent of winning the jackpot, but having a jackpot is not always enough. Sometimes, you need to feel the hope of a big win to really bring the thrills.

If, like with Mega Fortune, you'd had a chance to win bigger upon entering the mini game and if the mini game came more often, this could have been just a little higher on our list of must play games. Even if we don't hit it, we want the suspense of thinking we could, and with this mobile slot machine, you rarely get that feeling.

As it's stands, Pirate Radio is a good mobile slot that can be dependent on to work and a fun enough theme to draw us back from time to time, just in case that bonus features decide to appear in those first 50 spins.

Review by Lucky Mobile Slots, last updated: December 28, 2020 - Rating 3