Pirots 5 (2026) – ELK Studios | 10,000x, Cursed Temple & The Kraken World

After conquering space, the birds come home victorious, crash-land into a theme park map, and accidentally burn it — revealing the lost city of gold and the location of their traitor, Captain Blackfeather. The temple entrance warns of curses and lurking mummies. The birds walk in anyway. Pirots 5: Cursed Temple by ELK Studios is a 6x6 CollectR™ slot that expands to 8x8, built around the same four-bird gem-collection engine that has driven the series since its inception, now layered with catacombs, mummy fights, a Secret Door grid rotation, the Cursed Temple coin game, arrow shooter and boulder traps, a Labyrinth feature, a Switcheroo, a rotation trap, portals, Captain Blackfeather turning birds into ghosts, and nine collectable tokens spread across three worlds. The max win is 10,000x, the standard RTP is 96.0%, and the X-iter™ runs from 3x to 250x.

Update, August 2026: the token timer this review flagged back in June has paid off. ELK has shipped The Kraken, the second of the three promised worlds, adding the golden Compass Cannon feature symbol, a new coin game built around a Kraken and a music box, Charlie's Extra Chance, and expanded portal-tunnel behavior. Nothing about the Cursed Temple content changes — Blackfeather, the catacombs, and the mummy fights are all still exactly where they were. This is an addition, not a rework, and the score moves up slightly to reflect it. City of Gold remains the one world still to come.

The honest framing, shared by both reviewers who played this game extensively: is this too much? Complexity is always welcome in this house and the Pirots series has earned the right to be ambitious. But adding another layer of features onto an already feature-dense engine does not automatically improve the experience, and the ratio of bonus round length to reward is where that tension shows most clearly. Both reviewers reached the same conclusion independently: this is an absolutely playable, well-executed slot with arguably the best theme in the series — scarabs and Egypt are a nod to old school slots, a theme that always lands when executed with conviction, and ELK has executed it with conviction. But against the expectations that a Pirots sequel carries in 2026, we expected more. The 7.90/10 is what a game earns when everything is well-made, a promised expansion delivers competently on its promise, and the sum is still a little less than it should be.

Visuals & Theme: The Best-Looking Entry in the Series

Graphics Score: 8.70/10

The Cursed Temple setting is the strongest visual choice in the Pirots franchise to date. Where Lost in Space operated in the broadly familiar territory of space visuals and Inferno used fire-planet aesthetics, the Egyptian curse-and-temple world taps something older and more resonant — scarabs, hieroglyphs, mummies, golden treasures buried in walls, flickering torchlight, and an atmosphere of foreboding that the CollectR™ engine's movement mechanics actually reinforce rather than contradict. Birds scrambling through a cursed temple, triggering traps, fighting mummies in catacombs, and watching the grid rotate under a secret door: the theme and the mechanics speak the same language here in a way the previous entries did not always manage.

Captain Blackfeather is the visual standout character — a rival pirate with a skull aesthetic who turns birds into ghosts and transforms their gems into Blackfeather variants. The ghost bird animation, the Blackfeather gem redesign, and the takeover sequence are all rendered with the expressive character animation quality the ELK CollectR™ universe has established. The mummy fight in the catacombs is exactly as charming as it sounds: a bird squaring off against an ancient curse in a 2x2 coffin-lined chamber, the outcome binary and the stakes surprisingly legible.

The Kraken world adds a genuine highlight of its own: the music box animation in the Kraken coin game is a small but distinctive piece of design work — a tentacle striking across the grid in long horizontal sweeps, the music box relocating and drawing the eye each cycle, is a visual beat we don't recall seeing done quite this way elsewhere in the market. It's a minor addition against the size of the whole game, but it's a well-made one, and it's the reason the Graphics score moves up rather than staying flat. Worth noting for full transparency: the promotional trailer material accompanying the Kraken launch is genuinely well produced and cinematic, but it lives outside the actual game round and doesn't factor into this score — only what plays on the reels counts here.

The music deserves its own mention. It is catchy, thematic, and genuinely transporting in a way that most slot soundtracks are not. If you have played enough slots to have become numb to generic background loops, the Cursed Temple soundtrack will catch you off guard. It makes base game stretches feel shorter than they are.

The 8.70/10 reflects the strongest graphics score in the series reviewed here and a visual execution that genuinely elevates the overall product. It stops short of the near-perfect visual tier because the grid density at full expansion — four birds, traps, portals, catacomb markers, feature symbols, and bonus indicators all simultaneously active — creates a visual complexity that occasionally crosses into clutter. The world is beautifully built; reading it in real time during a dense mechanical sequence requires effort that simpler, more legible visual environments do not demand.

Technical Deep Dive: A Familiar Profile Carrying a Familiar Ceiling

RTP: 96.0% standard (87.0%–96.0% range by market) | Volatility: 7/10 Max Win: 10,000x | Grid: 6x6 expanding to 8x8 | Hit Frequency: 25.1% Bet Range: €0.20–€100 | Max Exposure: €1,000,000 X-iter™: Bonus Hunt 3x | Mega Hunt 10x | Cursed Temple / The Kraken 50x (per current world) | Bonus 100x | Super Bonus 250x

The 96.0% standard RTP is the same configuration that Huff N' Puff CollectR (8.35/10) delivered and that we specifically praised as a welcome departure from Pirots 4's 94%. It applies across all X-iter™ modes at 96.0% — the same clean configuration that made the Huff N' Puff buy menu straightforward to assess. The lower configurations down to 87.0% are a wider spread than most ELK releases carry and the standard verification applies. The Kraken update ships under the identical RTP and volatility profile — no changes to the underlying math model, just new content sitting on top of it.

The 10,000x ceiling is the point where the technical profile requires the most honest commentary in 2026. In Pirots 4, 10,000x arrived alongside a world-reveal innovation that had never been done before and the ceiling felt proportionate to the ambition. In Pirots 5, 10,000x arrives in a game with arguably more mechanical complexity than any previous entry in the series — catacombs, mummy fights, Secret Door, boulder and arrow traps, Labyrinth, Switcheroo, portals, Captain Blackfeather, the Kraken coin game, the Compass Cannon, nine tokens, three worlds — and the ceiling feels modest against that complexity. The 25.1% hit frequency is functional for 7/10 volatility. It does not soften the ceiling's honest limitations.

The 250x Super Bonus buy is the X-iter™ highlight and earns straightforward praise. Direct Super Bonus entry at 250x stake against a 10,000x ceiling is a 40x maximum return ratio — the same comfortable territory the Huff N' Puff Super Bonus occupied. The X-iter™ menu is tied to whichever world you're currently playing — you can only be in one world at a time — so the 50x direct-entry tier shows as the Cursed Temple buy in that world and The Kraken buy in the new one. Both coin games get the same fair 50x price point for direct access, and neither replaces the other. The 100x Bonus and 3x/10x frequency-enhancement options round out a menu that is well-proportioned across the tiers.

⚠ RTP Configurations: Standard RTP is 96.0% across all game modes and all X-iter™ options. The range extends down to 87.0% depending on market and operator. Always verify which configuration is active at your casino — particularly before using the Super Bonus or either world's 50x direct-entry buy.

⚠ Bonus Round Length: The combination of catacombs, Secret Door, Cursed Temple coin game, the Kraken coin game, and trap mechanics means individual bonus sessions can run very long relative to the outcome they deliver. Players using the 250x Super Bonus buy should be aware that the mechanical depth of the feature does not guarantee a proportionate return within any individual session.

Mechanics: Everything That Could Be Added, Was Added

Innovation Score: 7.70/10

The 7.70/10 Innovation score reflects a game that extends the CollectR™ framework with more simultaneous feature systems than any previous entry in the series — and where that extension is both the game's creative achievement and its primary limitation. Each feature, taken individually, is well-designed. The catacombs work. The Secret Door is a genuinely novel grid rotation event. Captain Blackfeather is a strong character mechanic. The Kraken coin game and its music box animation are a nice, distinctive spin that we haven't quite seen executed this way before. The Cursed Temple coin game builds logically on the coin game precedents in the series. The question the Innovation score asks is not whether the components work individually but whether the combination produces something greater than its parts — and our honest answer, even with the Kraken update folded in, is: not consistently. At its core, this update is a well-made variation on an established formula rather than a new idea, which is exactly why the score moves up only slightly rather than substantially — it keeps faith with the Pirots soul fans come back for, but it doesn't reset the ceiling on what this score can reward.

CollectR™ Core — Same Engine, Deeper Context

Four colour-matched birds move across the 6x6 grid collecting gems of their corresponding colour and all feature symbols. Gems upgrade through 7 payout levels. The symbol collection meter fills with gem and wild collections, releasing pending feature symbols when full. Up to three pending releases can be stored. Birds continue collecting until movement is impossible, then remaining symbols and birds settle by gravity and new symbols drop from above. This is the engine that has driven every entry in the series and it remains as engaging as it has always been — the movement mechanics, the colour-matching tension, and the cascading drop create a base game session feel that most fixed-grid releases cannot match.

Catacomb Corners and Mummy Fights

Each corner of the 6x6 grid is assigned a random bird's colour at the start of each round. If a bird collects a symbol on top of its matching catacomb corner, it enters the catacombs. Inside: four coffins in a 2x2 arrangement, gems and feature symbols in remaining positions, and a hidden position adjacent to each coffin. When a bird collects on a hidden position, a mummy fight triggers. Win the fight — a feature symbol is left on the mummy's position. Lose — the bird is removed, returned to its corner, and the game continues. Win all four fights and coins are added to all previous coffin positions. One potential fight per quadrant per round.

Captain Blackfeather entering the catacombs — or taking over a bird already in them — guarantees victory in every subsequent fight. This interaction is the catacomb system's most narratively satisfying moment: the villain arrives and clears the temple's obstacles rather than being stopped by them.

Captain Blackfeather

Captain Blackfeather can land on any drop. If a bird ends up adjacent to him, the Blackfeather feature triggers: Blackfeather turns 1–4 birds into ghosts, takes over their gem win counters and collectable feature symbols, transforms their gems into Blackfeather gems (which adopt the highest payout level of the taken-over birds), and then collects all Blackfeather gems and highlighted collectable feature symbols before being removed. A random chance exists for him to take over additional birds in view beyond the initial trigger.

Blackfeather is persistent between bonus drops in both bonus modes, moving to a new random position at the start of each bonus drop until the feature triggers. This persistence across the bonus creates a recurring threat-and-opportunity dynamic — Blackfeather appearing in the bonus is either a devastating takeover or an accelerating collection event depending on where and when it fires.

Secret Door and the Cursed Temple Coin Game

The Secret Door trap activates when a bird collects a symbol on top of it and all currently collectable symbols have been collected. It splits the 6x6 grid into four squares and rotates them 180 degrees, moving all symbols, birds, traps, and feature symbols into new positions. Floor tiles are replaced with cross-over tiles that allow birds to cross already-collected positions once each. If the birds cannot clear the entire grid during the Secret Door feature, the grid rotates back and the game continues.

The Cursed Temple coin game triggers only when the birds clear the entire grid during the Secret Door — not through a standard grid clear. This specificity is the mechanic's defining design tension: triggering the Cursed Temple coin game requires the Secret Door to fire, the rotation to place symbols in positions the birds can reach, and the birds to clear the grid completely before the cross-over tiles are exhausted. It is the game's rarest and most rewarding base game outcome.

The Cursed Temple coin game plays on an 8x8 grid with a 2x2 cursed treasure in the centre, one bird in each corner, initial coins, and a rotation trap. Three drops are awarded and reset whenever a new symbol or bird lands. If a bird ends up adjacent to the cursed treasure without more symbols to collect, a coin rain drops onto the grid — coins can land on empty positions, stack onto existing coins increasing their value, or land on birds multiplying their win counter by 2x. Captain Blackfeather, if present, upgrades the cursed treasure for a chance at additional coin rains at the start of each remaining drop.

💡 The Secret Door Clear: The most charged moment in Pirots 5 is not the Cursed Temple coin game itself — it is the second before the grid fully clears during the Secret Door feature. The birds are crossing rotated positions, each collection consuming a cross-over tile, and the question of whether the last symbol will be reached before movement becomes impossible is the game's most genuinely tense single event. When the grid clears and the Cursed Temple coin game triggers, it is earned in a way that most coin games are not.

New: The Kraken World

With the Cursed Temple's story beat resolved, the second of the three promised worlds has arrived. The Kraken slots in as a new coin game and set of surrounding mechanics, running on the same Secret Door trigger logic as the Cursed Temple coin game — clear the grid fully during a Secret Door rotation and you're taken to an 8x8 grid, now with the Kraken looming over it instead of the cursed treasure.

The centrepiece is the music box — a 2x2 fixture the birds must reach, same structural role as the Cursed Temple's treasure chest. Three drops are awarded, and landing a coin, bird, or symbol resets the counter back to three, which keeps the feature alive noticeably longer than a hard three-drop cap would. When a bird ends up adjacent to the music box, the Kraken strikes it with its tentacles — a series of horizontal sweeps up to eight symbol-spaces wide and one tall, dropping or upgrading coins as it goes. The music box then relocates and the cycle repeats a random number of times before the Kraken feature ends. It's a genuinely nice piece of animation work, distinctive from anything else in the CollectR™ catalogue, and the reason this update earns any bump to the Graphics and Innovation scores at all.

The golden Compass Cannon is the other significant addition, and it isn't exclusive to the Kraken world — it can land on any drop in the base game. It fires in one of 8 directions, converting gems in its path into feature symbols and clearing walls (up to three on a diagonal shot), then recoils in the opposite direction and reloads with a new random shooting direction. If the Compass Cannon is active when the Kraken coin game triggers, it carries over — and firing it straight up through the top row inside the Kraken coin game triggers a coin drop of its own, stacking value onto existing coins or multiplying a bird's win counter by 2x if it lands on one.

Two smaller additions round out the update. Charlie's Extra Chance can randomly trigger when the birds run out of collectable symbols, activating a random number of traps on the grid — a small mercy mechanic that keeps a stalled board moving. And portals, which existed in the original release as a minor detail, now do more: birds can teleport between two portals they're both adjacent to, walk directly onto a portal to reach otherwise-unreachable symbols, and if enough walls connect two portals in sequence, that wall segment becomes a tunnel that reveals feature symbols as a bird passes along it.

None of this touches the Cursed Temple content — Blackfeather, the catacombs, and the mummy fights play exactly as before. The Kraken sits alongside them as the second of the three worlds this review flagged as incoming back in June, and it plays like what it is: a confident, well-produced expansion of an established idea rather than a new one.

Traps — Arrow Shooter, Boulder, Rotation

• Arrow Shooter: appears on the outer rim of the grid, fires when birds cannot collect more symbols. An arrow hitting a bird transforms its corresponding gems into gems of a random other bird's colour and removes it from the grid until the next refill. If all four birds are hit, a random number of gems from the last surviving bird are turned into coins.

• Boulder: rolls horizontally or vertically across the grid when activated, crushing gems, walls, and birds in its path. Pending arrow shooters and feature symbols are not affected.

• Rotation Trap: when stepped on, held pending until collection exhausts, then 1–3 parts of the grid rotate into new positions. Can drop in again with the next refill.

Labyrinth, Switcheroo, and Super Switcheroo

Labyrinth triggers when three or more birds end up adjacent and cannot collect — it removes all gems from random rows and columns and moves the birds along them until they are separated. Switcheroo fires randomly when two adjacent birds cannot collect — they switch positions. Super Switcheroo moves one bird to the grid edge or to the next collectable symbol in its trajectory. These are base game interruption mechanics that can unlock collecting paths or introduce chaos in roughly equal measure.

The Nine Token System and Boss Castle

Nine tokens are distributed across three worlds (Cursed Temple, The Kraken, City of Gold), with three tokens per world. Tokens drop during any spin, each paying the equivalent of a 5x coin on collection. Collect all nine across all three worlds and the Boss Castle game unlocks permanently. Progress is global and persistent across bet levels, sessions, and game modes. With the Kraken now live, two of the three worlds are confirmed and playable — City of Gold remains the one piece of this arc still to arrive, and the Boss Castle payoff still sits on the other side of it.

X-iter™ Menu

Five options: Bonus Hunt (3x, 4x+ bonus trigger probability), Mega Hunt (10x, 20x+ bonus trigger probability), a direct coin-game entry at 50x, Bonus (100x), Super Bonus (250x). Which coin game the 50x tier drops you into — Cursed Temple or The Kraken — depends on which world you're currently playing, since only one world is active at a time. All configurations at 96.0% RTP. The 50x buy is the most distinctive entry point in the menu, and now it doubles as a direct line into whichever of the game's two signature coin games you're chasing, at a price that represents a fair ratio against the mechanical experience delivered.

Potential & Entertainment

Potential Score: 7.70/10 | Entertainment Score: 7.50/10

The Potential score of 7.70/10 reflects a 10,000x ceiling at 96.0% RTP with a well-proportioned X-iter™ menu. The Super Bonus at 250x carries a 40x maximum return ratio — comfortable and comparable to the best-priced direct feature buys in the ELK catalogue. The architectural path to the ceiling now runs through two coin games instead of one — the original Cursed Temple route and the new Kraken coin game, with the Compass Cannon offering an additional coin-drop trigger inside the latter — and the components cohere well with each other. The primary Potential deduction is the ceiling itself, which carries more weight in this specific context than in any previous Pirots entry: the mechanical complexity of Pirots 5 creates session lengths and feature depths that the 10,000x cap does not adequately compensate for, and adding a second coin game onto the same ceiling doesn't change that math. There is still a felt mismatch between the ambition of the feature architecture and the reward scale it sits within.

The Entertainment score of 7.50/10 holds steady rather than moving with the update, and that's a deliberate call. Both reviewers agree the Kraken content is well made and keeps faith with the series' identity — fans of Pirots will feel right at home in it. But our core reservation was never about any single feature's quality; it was about the learning curve created by stacking this many systems onto one grid. On this particular grid type — a dense, fast-moving CollectR™ board where you genuinely want to understand what's happening within the first few seconds of a long spin — that curve matters more than it would on a slower or more segmented game type. Adding a second coin game with its own trigger conditions, its own visual language, and its own new symbol (the Compass Cannon) is one more thing to track in real time, and it doesn't resolve that underlying tension so much as extend it into new territory. It's a very good game, well worth playing, and the Kraken update is a genuine plus. It just isn't the thing that changes the Entertainment calculus.

How Pirots 5 Compares

Guitar Quest (Relax Gaming, 8.57/10) is the comparison that illuminates the central question of this review most clearly — not because the games share a mechanic, but because they represent opposite design philosophies about what makes a slot engaging. Guitar Quest's Solo Mode is a single, mechanically simple idea — a Collector Bar sweeping a fretboard, coins descending, levels escalating speed — that achieves its extraordinary Entertainment score through the power of one intuitive, viscerally engaging concept executed with total conviction. Pirots 5 achieves its feature depth through the accumulation of well-designed components: catacombs, mummy fights, Secret Door, Cursed Temple coin game, Captain Blackfeather, traps, Labyrinth, Switcheroo, tokens. Both games are well-made. But the Guitar Quest Solo Mode leaves an immediate and lasting positive impression from a mechanic a player can understand on their first encounter. Pirots 5's feature set requires investment to understand, delivers variety and complexity in abundance, and does not produce a comparably singular moment of mechanical joy. A very simple, intuitive mechanic in Solo Mode can leave a much more positive impact than the layering of features — and that is the honest case the comparison makes.

Pirots 4 (ELK Studios, 8.68/10) is the direct predecessor and the comparison that hurts the most, because it illustrates exactly what made a Pirots entry exceptional and what Pirots 5 could not replicate. Pirots 4 earned a 10.00/10 Innovation score — the only perfect Innovation score in this catalogue to date — not because of mechanical complexity but because of a single idea that had never been done before in the slot market: a living slot universe that revealed new worlds, new villains, and new mechanics post-launch, transforming a slot machine into a narrative with stakes. That world-reveal mechanic created urgency, investment, and the specific excitement of something genuinely unprecedented. The Kraken update is, in fact, that same living-universe mechanic playing out exactly as promised — the token timer this review noted in June has now delivered its second world, on schedule, and that consistency deserves credit. But the individual update itself is a well-executed variation on the established formula rather than a new idea in its own right, so it moves the needle less than Pirots 4's original reveal did. The 0.78/10 gap between the two scores (8.68 versus 7.90) is narrower than it was in June, and it's worth watching what happens when City of Gold — and the Boss Castle behind it — finally arrives.

Final Verdict: More Features, Not More Magic

Pirots 5 is a well-made, beautifully themed, feature-rich addition to one of the most ambitious slot series in the market, and the Kraken update is a confident, well-produced continuation of it. The Egyptian curse aesthetic is still the series at its visual and atmospheric best, and the Kraken's music box animation is a genuinely nice piece of design work sitting alongside it. Captain Blackfeather is an excellent villain character. The Secret Door and its two coin games are the series' most structurally interesting mechanics, and the Compass Cannon adds a new layer of agency on top of them. The music will take you somewhere genuinely different. The 250x Super Bonus buy and the 50x direct-entry buy — now doing double duty into whichever coin game your current world offers — are both well-priced.

The honest limitation is equally clear: adding more features to an already complex system did not make the experience meaningfully easier to read, and the ratio of bonus round length to reward is still the number both reviewers kept returning to. In 2026, with a 10,000x ceiling, the feature complexity of Pirots 5 — now with a second coin game in the mix — demands more headroom than the cap allows. Every component works, individually and together. It keeps the Pirots soul intact and fans will love it for exactly that reason. The combination, against the expectations this series has built and the market it competes in, still produces a little less than it should.

Absolutely playable. Genuinely excellent theme. A solid, promise-keeping update. We still expected a bit more from the whole.

Score change log: June 2026 — 7.80/10 (Innovation 7.50, Graphics 8.50, Potential 7.70, Entertainment 7.50). August 2026 — 7.90/10 (Innovation 7.70, Graphics 8.70, Potential 7.70, Entertainment 7.50). The 0.20-point rise across Innovation and Graphics reflects The Kraken world update: the new coin game and its music box animation, the golden Compass Cannon, Charlie's Extra Chance, and expanded portal-tunnel behavior. Potential and Entertainment held steady — the added coin game doesn't change the ceiling math, and it doesn't resolve the series' core learning-curve issue either.