Five games deep, most slot series are running on fumes. The Pirots 5 slot turns up with something to prove instead. Elk Studios drops its four collecting birds into an Egyptian tomb this time, trading the last outing’s space station for a maze of traps, mummies and a cursed treasure. The bigger change is in the returns. Every Pirots before it ran at 94% RTP, the figure our reviews kept penalising them for, and this one finally reaches 96% while the volatility eases a notch. That fixes the series’ longest-standing flaw on its fifth try.
Nothing pays on a line here. The four birds come in red, purple, green and blue, each tied to a gem of its own colour. A bird walks to any matching gem beside it and collects it, along with any feature symbol it can touch. It can move several times before the grid refills. Collected symbols vanish, the rest drop, and fresh ones fall from above. The birds keep collecting for as long as one of them can still get to a gem.
The grid begins at 6×6 and grows to a full 8×8 as sections around it break open. Above it sits a collection meter that counts every gem and wild the birds gather, in normal play as well as the bonus. Fill it and a feature symbol release is banked, up to three at once, each one scattering new feature symbols onto the board. Gems rise up seven payout levels. An upgrade symbol raises one colour, an upgrade-all symbol raises all four, and a transform recolours a whole cluster to a bird’s colour and can mint extra feature symbols on the way. There’s a longer game stitched underneath, too, with nine collectible tokens split between three worlds that unlock a Boss Castle once you have the set.
Portals sit in the walls around the board. A bird with collectable gems next to two of them can teleport between them, and where walls link two portals they open into tunnels that reveal feature symbols as a bird passes. The Labyrinth is the disruptive one, stripping every gem from a random set of rows and columns and walking the birds apart until they’re separated.
Those coloured lights in the four corners aren’t decoration. Each one is a catacomb entrance lit in one bird’s colour, and when that bird collects a gem sitting on top of it, it drops underground to fight a mummy. Win the fight and it climbs back out holding a feature symbol, and one such duel can happen in each quarter of the board.
Captain Blackfeather is the traitor the birds came to find, and he plays rough. When he lands, he turns one to four birds into ghosts and takes their gems as his own Blackfeather gems, which run their own scale and top out at 30x, more than any standard gem. It reads like a possession. The birds recoil as he sweeps their colour off the board, and it usually signals a big payout, not a setback.
The tomb is not a quiet place to collect. Four traps sit around the grid and go off when the birds run out of options:
Collect three bonus scarabs in one round, and the bonus game opens with five drops. The grid size, the meter progress and every gem upgrade all carry in with you, so a bonus entered late in a hot round sets off from a much stronger place than one triggered cold. If one of those three scarabs is a super bonus symbol, the super bonus runs instead. Rarest of all is the Cursed Temple coin game, reached only by clearing the entire grid during the secret door feature. It plays on an 8×8 board built around a cursed treasure that curses the birds beside it and rains coins over the grid.
For players who’d sooner skip the wait, the X-iter buy-in menu offers five ways in. They cost 3x for a Bonus Hunt, 10x for a Mega Hunt, 50x for the Cursed Temple, 100x for the Bonus and 250x for the Super Bonus. They all hold the same 96% return as the base game.
Forget paylines. Every win in Pirots 5 comes from the four birds physically walking the grid, each one grabbing gems of its matching colour and any feature symbol it passes on the way. Movement is horizontal and vertical, and a bird can string several steps together before the board refills, which is how one spin can chain into a long run of collections. Collected symbols disappear, the remaining ones drop down and new symbols fill the gaps from above, and it repeats until no bird can get to anything new.
You can stake anything from $0.20 to $100.00, and each spin buys 100 coins. Because the collecting is automatic, the real skill is reading what’s on the board before you spin. With traps, portals, meters and token counters all live at once, a look at the rules first pays off, which is rare for a slot.
Pirots 5 runs at 96% RTP in the demo, the first Pirots to meet the modern benchmark. Elk also ships builds as low as 87%. Volatility lands at medium-high, a step gentler than its predecessors, and the maximum win is capped at 10,000x your bet. The $1,000,000 shown on the pay screens is that cap struck at the $100.00 top stake. If a MAX WIN coin lands, it pays whatever’s left to hit the maximum on the spot.
The four gem colours share one climb. Red leads the table and blue trails it, but every colour starts at level one and can be raised to level seven, where the values jump hard. That upgrade path, not the base values, is where a round’s real potential is decided. Coins carry their own value multipliers when the birds collect them.
| Level | Red | Purple | Green | Blue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 (Max) | 25.00 | 15.00 | 10.00 | 7.50 |
| 6 | 6.25 | 5.00 | 3.75 | 2.50 |
| 5 | 2.00 | 1.60 | 1.20 | 0.80 |
| 4 | 0.75 | 0.60 | 0.45 | 0.30 |
| 3 | 0.40 | 0.30 | 0.25 | 0.15 |
| 2 | 0.25 | 0.20 | 0.15 | 0.10 |
| 1 (Start) | 0.10 | 0.10 | 0.05 | 0.05 |
Per-gem values at a $1.00 spin, shown at all seven upgrade levels. Coin and token symbols pay their printed value times the active bet.
Four times now we've watched Elk's collecting birds put on a better show than their RTP deserved. Pirots 5 closes that gap. The move to 96% and a gentler volatility does more for the series than any added trap or coin game, because that sub-par return was the one thing keeping every previous entry low on our list. What's left is the most complete Pirots yet. It's denser, better animated, and for once paying at a rate that matches the spectacle. It still asks a lot of a newcomer, and the overlapping mechanics are worth a read through before you play. The 10,000x cap hasn't moved, but this is the first time the birds have earned their score outright.
The jump to 96% and the softer variance land exactly where the series needed them, and you feel it in shorter lulls between features. The animation is the best the studio has produced, and where most slots just spin and settle, this one never sits still. Birds squabble when they crowd together, and their eyes bulge when a fat multiplier drops. When the tomb goes dark, a bird pads along by torchlight with only the tiles around it lit and the rest of the grid swallowed in black, which does more for the temple-exploration feel than any backdrop. The danger layer gives the grid more to do than any Pirots to date, from the catacomb mummy fights to Blackfeather sweeping in and taking the birds’ colour for himself.
It’s still a wall of moving parts. Traps, portals, tunnels, meters, three worlds of collectable tokens all sit live at once, and a beginner will spend several rounds unsure what just happened, even after reading the rules. The game plainly assumes you already know the series. The 10,000x cap is unchanged across the series, so the top end hasn’t grown with the ambition. Its buys still hit hard, too. Our $250 Super Bonus came back at $166.55. That’s one session, not a pattern, but the buy price is worth knowing upfront.
At its heart, the CollectR format is untouched, still four birds pacing a 6×6 grid and collecting their colour, but the tomb hands it a new box of toys. Where the last game had grid-expanding bombs, this one has temple traps doing the shuffling. Where it had an alien invasion, this one has Blackfeather’s possession. It also adds a catacombs sub-round that sends a bird underground for a mummy fight, a wrinkle none of the previous entries had. It’s recognisably the same series, and the fullest version of it yet.
Presentation is where it steps clear of its siblings. A $10 Mega Hunt set the tone for us. It returned $29.25, then rolled straight into a five-drop bonus, with one green bird hopping through a portal mid-sequence to grab a cluster it couldn’t otherwise touch. Then Blackfeather dropped in for a $30.45 super win, ghosting one of the birds and taking its gems as his own gold, and the round settled at $183.30. Dust spilled from the ceiling, wilds scattered over the board, and it was, simply, a delight to watch. A later Super Bonus leaned harder into that personality, one trap firing and only the red bird dodging it before it crowed at the other three.
Set against its predecessors, the maths starts to matter. Our Pirots 2 session famously opened on eighteen dead spins in a row, and Pirots 3 and 4 kept running into the same 94% wall, with long droughts that the free play softened but never hid. At 96% and a notch lower volatility, those droughts are shorter here, and the main game feels less like waiting for the features to bail it out. It’s the one change you can feel within the early rounds rather than read off a stats screen.
None of that makes it an easy game to pick up. The early rounds are a blur. Traps fire, meters fill, counters tick, and Elk has done little to hold a beginner’s hand. Get past that, and the depth is the reward, not the obstacle.
Line it up against the family and the ranking sorts itself out. Pirots 2 was the dinosaur original that taught the format but buried you in dead spins, and it took a 2.5 from us for it. Pirots 3 and Pirots 4 took the Wild West and outer space, respectively, each denser than the last and each still held to a 3 by that stubborn 94% and a steep learning curve. This fifth entry keeps the density and the curve, but the jump to 96% is enough to move the needle.
For anyone who bounced off the older entries purely on the returns, this is the one worth coming back for. For newcomers, it’s still the deep end of the Pirots series, and the free play demo is there for a reason. Five games in, the numbers have caught up with everything else the series does well.
