Spice Slot Review

Let's talk about Spice, NetEnt's July 2026 release. First off, I have to give them credit for the theme: a crew of turtles running a spice racket across the city is exactly the kind of quirky, creative concept that makes opening a new slot fun. Mechanically, it's a tumbling grid game that leans heavily into a doubling multiplier feature. If you've played Microgaming's Whale Rush, you are going to feel right at home here.

The base game plays out on a 6-column grid. Every time you hit a winning combo, those symbols vanish, new ones drop in, and they leave behind an x2 multiplier on those empty spots. If you manage to land another win on those same squares during the cascade, the multiplier doubles.

In the base game, these multipliers wipe clean when the spin ends. However, to keep dead spins from getting too frustrating, there's a tracker lane running above the reels. It slides right to left, carrying modifiers like bombs, wilds, and symbol converters. If you hit a dead board, these can randomly drop in to force a chain reaction, which is a really nice touch to keep the momentum going.

You trigger the Free Spins by landing 3 to 6 scatters, which gets you anywhere from 5 to 12 spins. But what you're really looking for is the "Super Scatter." If one of those lands, you upgrade to the Super Free Spins. In either version, the grid multipliers become sticky. They don't reset between spins, meaning an early multiplier can snowball into something massive by the end of the round.

To see how it played, I bought my way in through the game's "Elevate" bonus buy menu.

• I started with the standard 100x buy. It was pretty brutal. I got the minimum 5 spins, the multipliers barely had time to build, and I walked away with about 14% of my money back.
• I then bit the bullet on the 500x Super Free Spins buy. This was a much wilder ride. I managed to grab a few extra spins from the top tracker lane, and because the multipliers held their value, spins three and four landed on a hot patch of the board. One corner actually hit x128, and I ended up getting about 90% of my 500x buy-in back.

There's also a 10x per-spin option in the menu that guarantees a multiplier on every position from the start. A word of warning on this: a multiplier is useless without a winning combo. If you buy it and hit a dead board, your 10x premium just vanishes. Proceed with caution.

Context-wise, Spice shares its Elevate menu and its 100x and 500x buys with two later NetEnt games, Judgemental and Aftermath.

But as I mentioned, its closest match is Microgaming's Whale Rush. They share a doubling multiplier mechanic and the exact same 100x and 500x bonus buy prices. The main difference is the engine: Whale Rush is a cluster-pay game where the multiplier only shows up after a cell clears twice, whereas Spice is a 15,625-way board that gives you the multiplier immediately. (Pragmatic's Moon Rush uses a similar mechanic on a scatter-pays board, but it caps each cell at x128 and ends the round at 5,000x.)

To be perfectly fair, Spice is a double-edged sword. Because the entire game is built around those doubling squares, the base paytable is incredibly flat. Even a premium 6-of-a-kind win will pay less than your stake if you don't have a multiplier to boost it.

If you like games where the base hits pay well, this will frustrate you. But if you're chasing that 15,000x max win and enjoy the snowball effect of sticky multipliers in a bonus round, Spice is a highly volatile, really entertaining ride. Just keep an eye on your bankroll.