Fruit Shop Grand Re-Opening Slot Review

NetEnt just dropped Fruit Shop Grand Re-Opening, and I finally got around to giving it a few spins. If you're a fan of the original 2013 game or its sequels, you'll immediately recognize the classic vibe. But this time around, NetEnt has bolted on a pretty heavy feature set, most notably a climbing multiplier track in the free spins. It's a cool concept, though it comes with a few quirks.

The main attraction here is the bonus round, triggered by landing three to five scatters. Depending on how many scatters you get, the game board actually expands up to four or five rows, giving you more paylines to work with.

The core mechanic is the multiplier ladder. Every time you get a winning combo, you move up a track that starts at x4 and can climb past x75. Whatever multiplier you land on applies to your next spin.

The downside is that the symbols act differently during the bonus. Hitting fruit wins will give you extra spins to keep the round going, which is great. But hitting the lower-paying card symbols (A, K, Q, etc.) will move you up the multiplier ladder without giving you extra spins. The track also throws in random perks like cash drops or sticky wilds, which is a nice touch. Everything resets when your spins run out.

I went straight for the top-tier bonus and bought it for 150x my bet. I started with 10 spins on a five-row board.

It was a bit of a slow burn. Because you have to build the ladder up, my first four spins played at a 1x multiplier and paid next to nothing. Eventually, the fruit started landing, and I managed to stretch the round out to about 24 spins. Interestingly, my biggest payouts didn't come from line wins, but from the random cash drops on the track (the two spins with cash drops paid 53x between them).

I ended the round with a 90x win. So, I took a loss on the 150x buy. Losing on bonus buys is just part of playing slots, but it did highlight a slightly frustrating mechanic: the bonus reels I saw were heavily loaded with card symbols. They do a great job of pushing your multiplier up, but because they don't award extra spins, they kind of act like the brakes, killing your momentum right when things get interesting.

If you like tweaking your game, there are a few special bet options you can toggle on. You can pay 2x your bet to guarantee a scatter on the board, or 10x to guarantee a winning fruit combo to kick off a respin chain. The 10x bet buys you the start of a respin chain, not the bonus itself. And one guaranteed scatter is still two short of a trigger.

You can also buy the bonuses directly for 70x, 100x, or 150x. The good news here is that NetEnt kept the math fair. No matter which option you choose, the RTP stays within half a point of the base 96.37%, so you aren't punished for taking a shortcut.

Grand Re-Opening definitely keeps the simple identity of the Fruit Shop series alive while adding some modern depth. It reminds me a bit of NetEnt's own Reel Rush XXXtreme with its expanding board and respins, and its Elevate menu works like the one in Spice, which came out three weeks later.

If you look outside of NetEnt, Pragmatic Play's Out of the Woods uses a similar "win-and-spin-again" climbing multiplier. However, Pragmatic's game offers a 10,000x max win, which makes Fruit Shop's 5,000x cap feel just a little bit modest for a modern expanding-grid slot.

The Bottom Line: It's a fun, nostalgic game with a clever multiplier mechanic and a solid RTP. Just keep in mind that the 5,000x max win is a bit low, and card-symbol wins push the multiplier without adding spins, so the bonus can stall itself out just as those multipliers get going. It's definitely worth checking out if you love the series, but I'd recommend treading lightly with the expensive bonus buys!