Small wins land often enough in the Cygnus 5 slot, but the prism changes the size of them. A single symbol separates a $0.10 drop from a $28 one, and ELK prices it accordingly. X-iter, their buy menu, will sell you a pair of prisms for 25x the bet, with no bonus round attached. What that money buys is a beam. The prism has to work its way to the bottom row, and then the symbols its beams touch all turn into the same paying symbol, with a second prism setting off a chain of its own if a beam catches it.
Cygnus 5 opens each round 6 columns wide and 4 rows deep, which is 4,096 ways. Winning symbols explode, and the survivors drop through the game’s avalanche system. Rather than falling in neat columns, they shuffle sideways into the gaps and settle where they can. Each winning drop stacks a fresh row on top, and a run of them takes the grid to its full 8 rows. Wins keep the avalanche alive, and the round ends on the drop that fails to produce one.
A prism does nothing where it lands. It fires only once it has made the bottom row. The directions are picked at random, and the symbols a beam touches all become a single symbol the game chooses. Only the squares where 2 beams cross come out as wilds. A beam that catches its neighbour sets off that prism as well, and on it goes. The symbol you want it to choose is the golden sun, which pays 25x what a line of blue gems does.
The pillar standing alongside the reels is dark at the start of a round. A multiplier symbol wakes it up by reaching the bottom row or the leftmost column. The first one fixes the starting number, each one after that moves the light up a step, and the symbol then turns into a wild.
Whatever the pillar reads applies to the wins that follow in that round, so a prism pays 3 times as much at 6x as it does at 2x. Every multiplier symbol that arrives takes it a step higher, and our best round reached 8x. Fill the pillar to the top, and the game pays out whatever is still needed to reach 50,000x the bet, then closes the round on the spot.
The meteors arrive without warning and swap a random number of ordinary symbols for feature symbols. It is the game’s way of handing you prisms and multipliers you did not earn. What it cannot choose is where they land. Three prisms in the top rows do you no good on their own, and if the drops stop before they have worked their way down, the round takes them with it.
A bonus symbol has to travel to the far-left column, which usually takes it a drop or 2, and the game hands over 7 free drops. The pillar is the reason to care. It carries the multiplier it had into the round and holds that reading for all 7 drops rather than starting each one from nothing, which makes this the one place where the prism and the pillar reliably pull together. A further bonus symbol that gets there extends the round. The super bonus symbol does that and upgrades it too, promising a Meteor Strike in each drop still to come.
Most buy menus sell the bonus and stop there. X-iter prices the parts separately, and at our $1 stake, the middle 2 are the interesting ones. $10 puts a Meteor Strike into the drop you pay for. $25 lands at least 2 prisms in it. The bonus itself is $100 and the super version $500, while $3 a spin buys better than triple the usual chance of either bonus landing on its own.
| X-iter door | Cost at $1 | What it guarantees |
|---|---|---|
| Bonus Hunt | $3 a spin | More than 3 times the chance of a bonus or super bonus |
| Meteors | $10 | Meteor Strike guaranteed, drop 1 |
| Prisms | $25 | At least 2 prisms on the opening drop |
| Bonus | $100 | Entry to the 7 free drops |
| Super Bonus | $500 | The 7 free drops, with a Meteor Strike in every one |
The number to know first is 94%, and it holds everywhere. That is what Cygnus 5 returns in free play and in real money play, in every mode, and it sits well beneath the 96% most slots pay back. What the 2 missing points buy is the 50,000x pillar and the volatility to match. Stakes run from $0.20 to $100.
Wins begin on the leftmost of the 6 columns and run rightwards with no gaps, and where 2 ways overlap only the longer run is paid. What the growing board changes is the counting. 4 rows give 4,096 ways. Each winning drop adds a row, so those 6 columns climb to 15,625 ways, then 46,656, then 117,649, and to 262,144 at the full 8 rows. The pillar multiplies the result. A line of 6 suns pays $5.00 at our $1 bet, and the identical line with the pillar on 6x pays $30.00.
| Symbol | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Golden sun | $5.00 | $3.00 | $2.00 | $1.00 |
| Cat | $0.50 | $0.30 | $0.25 | $0.20 |
| Cobra | $0.40 | $0.25 | $0.20 | $0.15 |
| Falcon | $0.30 | $0.20 | $0.15 | $0.10 |
| Red, green or blue gem | $0.20 | $0.15 | $0.10 | $0.05 |
Symbol values as they read at our $1 bet. The 3 gems are worth as much as each other, so the sun is the symbol you want a prism to choose.
ELK build the temple first. A moon hangs over it, a constellation drifts behind the reels, two statues hold their orbs at the doors, and the score is heavy and calm at once. Then a prism reaches the bottom row and the temple shows what it was built for. A prism at 6x pays three times what the same prism pays at 2x, and that gap is the whole game: the pillar decides what the prism is worth, and outside the free drops, nothing makes the two line up on purpose.
Regular play is the series doing what it has always done, and it is still good to watch. The symbols do not spin. They tumble in sideways and pile up, and the grid is 2 rows taller by the end of a good round than it was when the drop started. The wins along the way are mostly gems at 5 or 10 cents. Then a prism reached the floor with the pillar on 3x, filled a third of the board with golden suns, and paid $28.55.
The 2 middle doors are the unusual part. $10 bought us a Meteor Strike, and the feature symbols it threw up arrived high on the grid, where the drops ran out before they could reach the floor. $25 bought its guaranteed pair and came back $20.25 with the pillar stuck at 3x. The 2 of them came to $35 and taught us more about the game than the $100 door did.
The $100 bonus is where the game clicks, because the pillar keeps every step it reaches. A trail of light ran up the tower, the 7 free drops screen came up, and the temple went purple with whispers layered under the music. By drop 3 the pillar was on 3x, and the win counter rose from zero to $57.60 under a Super Win banner. A prism on drop 6 turned a base line into $48.00 at 6x. The multiplier finished on 8x, the round closed at $173.15, and the $100 it cost looked well spent.
The $500 Super Bonus came next, an S sitting above the pillar and a Meteor Strike promised in each drop. Almost all of it happened on the first one. The pillar was already carrying 3x, reached 6x while the prisms were still falling, and returned $57.60, then $44.80 at 8x. A third prism reached the bottom, shot a line of light up the grid, and the wins kept rolling until the best banner we saw, Stargazing, landed at $303.60. A further $38.40 followed. Over $440 from a single drop, with 6 still to play.
The 6 drops that followed shared $56.55 between them. Meteors kept coming and kept landing where nothing could use them, and a late prism brought the only win of any size. At the close it read $500.95. The best single drop paid over $440. The round it came from cost $500 and gave back $500.95, a profit of 95 cents.
The Cygnus society travels, and the games follow it. Cygnus 4 put it in 18th century London and gave its pillar a Level Up symbol that rotated the whole scale to a higher one. Cygnus 6 took it to Machu Picchu and dropped the prism, putting star constellations, a Realm feature and a second bonus route in its place, which our review of that game calls the densest build in the series. Cygnus 4 and 6 both run more features at once than Cygnus 5 does, but neither turns a whole board into one payout the way a single prism can. Cygnus 5 sits in an Egyptian temple with one big idea, a prism, and a pillar that prices what it’s worth.
