What 4 Gates of Pyramid actually is
Eight free spins. Four features that can show up alone or stacked together. A grid that can stretch from 15 symbol positions to 25. And a Grand Jackpot worth 1,000x the stake.
The 4 Gates of Pyramid slot is a new release from Kendoo, added to the studio’s Master Pots series, played on a 5×3 grid and built around Bonus symbols and Collect mechanics. Its selling point, and the reason it got a press release, is what Kendoo calls four-way feature action: four separate free spins features named Ultra, Extra, Rise and Boost, any one or more of which can be active when the bonus round begins.
So the honest one-line answer to the question people are actually asking: the four gates are not four distinct bonus games you choose between. They are four modifiers that attach to a single free spins round, in combination.
Pyramid in the title, Aztec in the artwork
Worth flagging before anyone goes hunting for scarabs: Kendoo’s own announcement places the game against an ancient Aztec backdrop, not an Egyptian one. The pyramid in the name is doing a lot of work for a game that sits in Mesoamerican art direction. If you search for this as a pyramid themed slot expecting hieroglyphs and Anubis, adjust your expectations by a continent.
Who is Kendoo?
Kendoo is a slot provider that builds feature-led games, with the Master Pots series as its recognisable line, and it has been expanding into regulated European markets, including Belgium through a StarCasino partnership. That is the extent of what the studio’s own announcement supports. It is not a household name on the level of the large content houses, which matters mainly in one practical sense: availability depends on which aggregator your operator uses.
How the four-way feature action works
The sequence is trigger, then free spins with one or more of the four features switched on, then the chance to unlock extra spins and additional features mid-round. Kendoo’s description makes the combination the point. You are not picking a door; you are finding out how many doors opened at once.
What triggers the four gates feature
Bonus symbols trigger the free spins round, and the award is eight free spins. What the studio’s announcement does not state is how many Bonus symbols you need, or on which reels they have to land. It also says nothing either way about a feature buy, which is now standard on most feature-led slots but should not be assumed here.
That gap matters more than it sounds. On a four-way feature slot, the trigger count is half the story: if only one of the four features is active on a minimum trigger and more arrive with extra Bonus symbols, then the “four gates” headline describes a rare best case rather than a normal round. The paytable in the game’s info screen will tell you. The press material will not.
What happens inside each gate
Three of the four features are described in Kendoo’s announcement. One is not, and I would rather say so than fill the space with a guess.
| Feature | What it does | Confirmed by Kendoo? |
|---|---|---|
| Extra | Adds special green Bonus symbols that can award additional free spins when collected | Yes |
| Rise | Expands the game field from 5×3 to 5×5 | Yes |
| Boost | Increases the potential for Collect opportunities | Partly, the extent is not specified |
| Ultra | Not described in the launch announcement | No |
Read down that list and the design logic is clear enough. Extra buys you length, Rise buys you surface area, Boost buys you density of Collect events. Each one raises the ceiling of the round in a different direction, and because they can combine, the best outcomes come from overlap rather than from any single feature. A round with Rise and Boost together has more positions and more collect chances on each of them, which is where the 1,000x Grand Jackpot presumably lives.
What I would not do is treat “four features” as a promise of four times the value. Combination mechanics are usually weighted so that the full stack is rare by design, otherwise the maths does not balance.
How this compares with classic Hold and Win Egyptian slots
The baseline template is familiar to anyone who has played a pyramid slot in the past five years. Coin or money symbols land on the reels, a set number of them triggers a respin round, each new coin that lands locks in place and resets the respin counter, and the round ends when you run out of respins or fill the grid. Fixed jackpots sit above the coin values, often awarded for filling the screen. The appeal is that you can read your own position at a glance: you know exactly how many respins are left and exactly what is on the board.
4 Gates of Pyramid keeps the Collect vocabulary and moves the action somewhere else. The round is a free spins round with a fixed eight-spin start, not a respin lock-in round, and the variable element is which modifiers are running rather than how many coins have stuck. That is a structural difference, not a reskin. But it is also not the reinvention the “revolutionary” framing in the launch coverage suggests, and that word is the developer’s, not an editorial verdict. Collect mechanics, Bonus symbols, expanding grids and retriggered spins all exist elsewhere. What Kendoo has done is bundle them as toggles on one round.
There is a genuine cost to that trade. Classic Hold and Win is legible: you can see what you are chasing. A combinatorial feature set is not. When three of your four modifiers can be absent and one of them has not even been publicly described, you cannot tell during the round whether you are in a good version or a bad one. Some players find that more exciting. I find it harder to play well, and “harder to read” is not a neutral quality when the house edge is already doing its work.
Volatility and what players can expect
The published RTP for 4 Gates of Pyramid is 95.79%, per SlotCatalog, which puts the house edge at 4.21% and places the game slightly below the ~96% midpoint for modern slots. No volatility figure has been published. What the structure suggests is a high-variance profile: fixed jackpot prizes, a bonus round that carries most of the top-end potential, and features that multiply each other when they overlap all push payouts towards rarer, larger outcomes.
A note on the 1,000x Grand Jackpot. Among modern high-volatility slots, a four-figure multiple of stake as the headline prize is respectable rather than extreme, and plenty of games advertise considerably higher ceilings. More feature complexity does not automatically mean a bigger top end. If you are chasing the largest possible multiple, this is not the game for it.
Two things to check in the paytable before your first spin: whether the game ships with multiple RTP configurations, which many providers now offer and which operators select from, so the 95.79% figure may not be the one running at your site, and what the Grand Jackpot actually requires. A fixed jackpot awarded for filling an expanded 5×5 grid is a very different proposition from one tied to a single symbol landing.
Before you load it up
Open the game info and paytable at your operator first, because that is the only place the Bonus symbol trigger count, the Ultra feature description, the RTP in use and the jackpot conditions are stated authoritatively. Check that the title is licensed and available in your jurisdiction; a new release from a mid-sized studio reaches regulated markets unevenly, and a demo you can load on one site may be absent from another.
None of the above is a recommendation to play. Slots carry a built-in house edge and return less than they take over time, which is the point of the business model. If you do play, you must be 18 or over, set deposit and loss limits before you start rather than after a bad run, and use the session reminders and cool-off tools your operator is required to offer.
What is still unanswered is the part that would actually settle the argument: whether four combining modifiers produce better sessions than one clean, readable Hold and Win grid, or just a noisier route to the same mathematical destination. That depends on hit frequency and on how often the full stack of gates opens, and neither figure is public yet.