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If you’ve been spinning slots for a while, you know NetEnt’s Fruit Shop, and now the shop is opening its doors again with Fruit Shop Grand Re-Opening.
But if you’re coming in expecting a standard spin-and-win experience, you might want to adjust your expectations. This time around, NetEnt has bolted an expanding grid and a climbing multiplier onto their classic fruit symbols. The result? A highly volatile game where you aren’t hunting for one massive spin, but rather a snowballing chain reaction.
The Base Game: Running on Fruit Power
At first glance, the base game looks incredibly basic: a 5×3 layout with just 13 fixed paylines. A standalone three-of-a-kind plum or orange is barely going to make a dent in your balance.
The entire engine here relies on Re-Spins. Any winning line that includes a fruit symbol (cherry, watermelon, orange, plum, or grape) awards a respin. Cherries are the MVPs here, landing a five-of-a-kind pays a solid 50x your bet and gives you up to five extra spins. As long as the fruit keeps dropping, the reels keep spinning.
While this is happening, the Flavor Meter is watching. Every win pushes the meter forward, bigger fruit wins by more steps, and every four steps, your global multiplier levels up, climbing from 2x all the way to 14x in the base game.
There is a major speedbump built into this game, and it comes in the form of royal card symbols (10 through Ace). While card wins do pay out and move the Flavor Meter forward, they do not trigger respins. During my session, I found this incredibly frustrating. You’ll frequently watch a great chain reaction stall out just as your multiplier gets high, simply because a line of Kings hit instead of a fruit. They are the drag on the layout, and you have to accept them as part of the game’s high volatility.
The Bonus Round: Taking Your Multiplier With You
To get anywhere near the game’s respectable 5,000x max win, you need Bonus Spins, and those come from three Fruit Bonus crates landing anywhere on the board, on a normal spin or in the middle of a Re-Spins chain.
When this happens, the game opens up. Four crates start the bonus on four rows and five crates on five, with the paylines rising to a maximum of 34, and an Extra Row from the meter can add a row along the way. But the best mechanic in Grand Re-Opening is the carry-over feature. If you trigger the bonus crates during an active Re-Spins chain, the game folds your leftover respins into your bonus count and carries your hard-earned multiplier inside with you.
This exact scenario provided the highlight of my review session. After sitting through about a dozen dead spins, a tiny cherry win kicked off a chain reaction. It ran for twelve consecutive boards, pushing my Flavor Meter to a 10x multiplier. On that twelfth board, the three crates finally landed. I went into the bonus with my leftover spins, and immediately hit two cherry pairs and a Mystery Drop (a cash prize multiplied by your current meter). At 10x, that single drop paid 32x, pushing my total round to a very tidy 61.8x my bet.
A Close Relative and the Elevate Menu
Mechanically, Fruit Shop Grand Re-Opening sits close to NetEnt’s Don’t Eat the Candy, another 5×3 lines board that grows extra rows, but the persistent meter stretches the potential much further here.
For players who hate the base-game grind, NetEnt has included their Elevate menu. You have five options here, ranging from the 2x Bonus Hunt (which guarantees at least one crate on the reels) up to a 150x outright buy of the top-tier Orchard Spins. Thankfully, no matter how you play, the RTP hovers fairly close to the 96.37% baseline.
