101 Candies

101 Candies: Slot Overview

Since NetEnt was bought out by Evolution, does it seem like the studio has been on a bit of a food bender? Following the deal, we've had foodie-filled games like Cupcakes, Milkshake XXXtreme, Taco Fury XXXtreme, and Fruit Shop Frenzy. Well, time to add another calorific slot to the list in the form of 101 Candies. As the name suggests, 101 Candies is a cluster-paying grid slot with a sweet theme, where a conveyor belt of wild multipliers is joined by several special Feature Coin symbols and free spins to add extra, uh, sweetness. Just how sweet? Time to find out.

101 Candies has a vaguely Fruit Shop Megaways look about it, where a gaming grid is wedged on the side of a vehicle parked out in the countryside somewhere. The graphical quality isn't great. Everything has a smooth, shiny look to it as if it was rushed through MS Paint and didn't make a great first impression. Players who have felt that NetEnt's work has been patchy of late will not be reassured by the presence of 101 Candies on their screen.

Still, the gameplay might be good enough to blitz any early feelings of ill will, so let's press on. Spoiler alert, if you like highly wound cluster paying slots, 101 Candies will probably feel a tad underpowered. One reason is its low-medium volatility math model, available in a variety of RTP configurations, where the highest is 96.08%. Players have the option of buying the free spins feature or stick to wagering 20 p/c to $/€120 per paid game round. Each round drops 49 symbols onto its 7x7 gaming board, with the aim of landing at least 5 matching symbols connected to each other in vertical or horizontal directions.

Winning clusters are removed from the grid by the Avalanche feature, which proceeds to fill the gaps by dropping symbols down from above. Avalanche win runs end only when no new winning cluster appears. Sweets, sweets, and more sweets make up the paytable. On the lower side are 6 candies not in packets, while the 3 high pays stand out from the others since they are contained in packets. Hitting a 5- of-a-kind cluster awards 0.05 to 0.15 times the bet, rising to 2 to 30 times the bet for a 12+ sized cluster.

101 Candies: Slot Features

Not the biggest cluster values ever seen, but 101 Candies makes use of a Wild Conveyor feature, Feature Coin symbols, free spins, and a buy feature to help pep payouts.

Wild Conveyor Feature

In the base game and in free spins, a Wild Conveyor with wild symbols on it sits above the reels. Each wild symbol has a multiplier from x2 to x101 at the most, and new wilds coming onto the Wild Conveyor to fill empty spaces generally have increasing values. During each Avalanche, the leftmost wild symbol on the Wild Conveyor moves to the grid, replacing a symbol on the reels, and all wilds on the Wild Conveyor shift to the left – a new wild is added to the rightmost side. Wilds will not replace another wild or a scatter on the reels. In the base game, the Wild Conveyor resets at the start of each spin. Wilds replace any regular pay symbol, and their value multiplies the cluster win. If more than one wild is part of a win, multiplier values are added before being applied.

Feature Coin Symbols

A random Feature Coin may appear on the gaming grid during an Avalanche, triggering its corresponding feature. Feature Coins activate, then disappear from the reels in an Avalanche before a wild symbol moves from the Wild Conveyor to the reels.

• The Upgrade symbol increases the multipliers of all wild symbols by 1 up to a maximum of x101.
• The Destroy symbol removes 5 wild symbols from the Wild Conveyor.
• The Scramble symbol shuffles all wild symbols on the Wild Conveyor.
• The Transform symbol picks a random symbol on the reels and replaces all instances of it with another symbol. It does not choose scatters or wilds.

Free Spins

Scatters can appear on initial spins in the base game and during Avalanches. When 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 scatters hit, players win 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15 free spins, respectively. In free spins, the Wild Conveyor resets once at the start of the round, otherwise the same rules as the base game apply.

Buy Feature

Free spins can be bought for the cost of 100x the bet. When bought, 10 to 15 free spins will be awarded.

101 Candies: Slot Verdict

If we didn't know better, it might have been easy to think 101 Candies came from an up-and-coming studio rather than one that has been in the business as long as NetEnt has. Of course, not every game a studio designs has to be a gleaming flagship release which dazzles the socks off every player who basks in its glory. Even allowing for that, 101 Candies is a mediocre game by NetEnt standards. It looks cheaply made, was achingly slow to play, and just wasn't a whole lot of fun. The gameplay struggled to do anything to offset the poor visuals, and when the test run concluded, a sigh of relief was about all 101 Candies managed to elicit.

Highlights, highlights, and the underlying concepts behind the Wild Conveyor are quite smart. Having a wild multiplier shoved onto the grid with Avalanches possessing increasing values is interesting. It's too bad that wild multipliers have been paired with relatively small cluster values. Many a time, a solid multiplier would land on the reels, coupled with a small cluster and end up being like 3 or 4 times the bet, or thereabouts. Or less. For a game board which has 49 symbols on it, maxing clusters out at 12+ felt disappointingly limited. Limited is the max win, too, at 3,580x the bet. Not exactly the worst figure imaginable, but when considering the amount of wild multipliers hitting the screen with potential values of up to x101, the max win came across as mismatched.

Hats off to NetEnt's maths team then for managing to squeeze in so much multiplicative action while keeping it all on a relatively tight leash. 101 Candies' particular setup might suit players who prefer gambling on the lower-mid volatile end of the spectrum, but the lacklustre pace and subpar graphics might make it hard to swallow, even amongst those in its target audience.