You might be more used to heading to the Americas for your buccaneering adventures, which is why it’s a refreshing change to try out another pirate’s life. Pirate from the East sees you take the mantle of one of the Japanese pirates who thrived on imperial shipping in the South China sea when Johnny Depp and friends were gallivanting around the Caribbean.
This slot looks good and promises some serious booty, but will you be a pirate king or are you destined for the locker? Let’s take a look in our Pirate from the East review.
It’s clear from the beginning that Swedish studio NetEnt had the Asian markets firmly in their sights when they created this game, with the design’s manga-influenced details on full view from the start. As it’s set in Asia it’s nice to see all the details that are different from the usual pirate fare, from the square sailed junks that represent the ships to the Japanese characters on all of the loot and equipment. The game looks good, with decent animations bringing the scenes to life and a typical tropical island background to the reels. The low-value symbols are represented by the standard 9 – A icons, but the high-value symbols have got the pirate treatment too, including compasses, guns and cutlasses, treasure chests, pirate ships and bottles of sake instead of rum.
The game gets even better when you look at the mechanics, with a standard five reels and three-row layout that encompasses 15 paylines. While the betting limits aren’t amazing, falling between £€$0.15 and £€$75, there is a potential maximum jackpot of 2000x your stake on one spin with five treasure chests, so nothing to sniff at. This is evident in the higher than average RTP of 96.38%.
Two symbols we haven’t mentioned yet, the male and female pirates, act as the wild and scatter symbols respectively in the Pirate from the East slot game, with the female pirate, in particular, paying her weight in gold. She pays more every time she lands on the reels, up to a maximum of 100x your stake. She also acts as a scatter, so that if she appears three times or more on the same spin the free spins feature is activated. The number of spins is revealed by clicking on one of the scatters you landed the more scatters you got the more diverse the choice is, with a maximum of 28 in play, while you then repeat the process again in order to choose your multiplier. Using this method allows you to have up to a 6x multiplier, so there are big wins in the offing if you’re lucky.
Pirate from the East is an interesting new take on a traditional slot favourite. It’s interesting to see the art and design of a pirate game re-jigged around an Asian theme, and the graphics and animations both hold up nicely in comparison to other games on the market. The bonus round is also a nice touch, with the pick and win format adding a bit of variance into the mix.