Pyramid Pays: Slot Overview

Ah yes—Ancient Egypt’s familiar sandstone, pyramids, and endless dunes. The industry’s favorite historical setting is back once more, this time as the theme for a slot called Pyramid Pays from iSoftBet. Reusing a well-worn theme isn’t a problem when a studio brings something fresh, clever, or genuinely entertaining to the table. When it doesn’t, it becomes tough to feel much enthusiasm, let alone muster the energy to push through a full review. Still, staying optimistic, let’s step inside and see what turns up.

Pyramid Pays runs on a 5×3, 243 pay ways layout set in the ever “mystical” world of Ancient Egypt. To build the scene, iSoftBet has added Pharaoh statues, shimmering turquoise water, and distant pyramids showing bet multipliers. What you see will vary slightly depending on the device you’re playing on. No matter the screen, though, Pyramid Pays comes across as fairly standard. The same can be said for the typical Egypt-style soundtrack and the simple white reels, which lend a retro vibe—perhaps that’s exactly what Pyramid Pays is aiming for.

Available on desktop, mobile, and tablet, Pyramid Pays lets you wager from 30 p/c or as high as $/€30 per spin. With medium/high volatility, the base game doesn’t offer much in the way of extras beyond a multiplying wild, which can start to feel repetitive over time. The free spins bonus seemed to take its time showing up—or maybe it didn’t, and it only felt slow because not much else was happening. Overall, things balance out with Pyramid Pays delivering a theoretical return of 96%, which is firmly in average territory.

Wins are paid for adjacent matching symbols landing left to right, beginning on the leftmost reel. The symbol set features old-school styled tiles, starting with 9-A card ranks, then Ankhs, scarabs, Eyes of Horus, cat statues, and pharaohs. In every case, at least three matching symbols are required to form a win, and the visuals have that classic slot feel—almost like something adapted from a land-based cabinet. In terms of payouts, hitting five premium symbols returns 0.83 to 1.5 times the stake. A Cleopatra-like character appears as the wild symbol, which can land on reels 2, 3, or 4, with only one wild possible per spin. Wilds substitute for any paying symbol and multiply any win they are part of by x2.

Pyramid Pays: Slot Features

Bonus content in Pyramid Pays comes via free spins, during which the Pyramid Pays feature can be activated—landing 3 Pyramid scatter symbols on reels 1, 3, and 5 kicks things off by awarding 15 free spins. While in free spins, the gameplay rules are mostly unchanged, except that landing 3 scatters grants an additional free spin and triggers the Pyramid Pays feature.

Once the Pyramid Pays feature starts, play moves away from the reels to a pyramid displaying 9 multiplier prizes, ranging from x2 up to x100. One multiplier is randomly selected, and the prize awarded equals your stake multiplied by that value. Any multiplier that has been awarded is then removed, meaning it can’t be won again the next time the feature activates. Pyramid Pays may trigger multiple times during free spins, and up to 9 prizes can be collected.

One last detail: if the Pyramid Pays feature is triggered with a Booster Scatter on the last reel, all prizes on the Pyramid are doubled for the remainder of the bonus round.

Pyramid Pays: Slot Verdict

iSoftBet has proven plenty of times that it can produce sharp-looking slots packed with creative mechanics. Pyramid Pays shows the studio is equally capable of pushing out a filler-style release for the catalogue. There simply weren’t many moments during testing that made you think, “this is genuinely impressive.” The presentation is basic, the audio is serviceable, the bonus felt like it took ages to arrive, and when it finally did, it didn’t exactly deliver a big payoff. To be fair, it likely wasn’t that slow—it just felt that way because the base game doesn’t offer much to break things up.

Since the main game doesn’t have much going on, the bonus is where attention naturally lands. The trigger awards 15 free spins, which is a respectable starting amount. Also, landing three scatters to activate the Pyramid Pays Feature is more achievable than you might expect, which likely explains why it only awards one extra spin each time. The prize-picking round can be decent, and the highest result reached 400x at most during testing. We didn’t hit the top reward ourselves, but it’s easy to imagine the doubled values adding up to something worthwhile.

Even so, it feels like you have to work pretty hard to find strong positives for Pyramid Pays. It doesn’t really elevate the overall iSoftBet range, and the studio is clearly capable of more. The biggest issue is the sheer number of Egyptian-themed slots already out there—many of them far more memorable—so this one risks being lost in the crowd. The Pyramid Pays feature has its moments and will definitely excite some players, but the rest of the experience doesn’t do enough to lift it beyond the level of average.