Fruit Shop Frenzy

Fruit Shop Frenzy: Slot Overview

One pivotal moment in the Robin Williams classic movie Hook was when Peter Banning, the mild-mannered lawyer, opened up his imagination and could see food on a table which was previously empty. What proceeds from there is a food fight of epic proportions, a frenzy of food throwing, if you will. It is in the spirit of frenzy-ness that we come to Fruit Shop Frenzy, an online slot from software provider NetEnt. Players who have been spinning reels for a while may well be aware of the original Fruit Shop, which the studio released back in 2011. A Megaways version followed a decade later, and 2 years on, we've got part 3 - Fruit Shop Frenzy.

With all due respect, the original Fruit Shop slot is kinda looking its age by now, and the Megaways game, while possessing a visual upgrade, retained a lot of the first one's graphical simplicity. Fruit Shop Frenzy, by contrast, tells something of a story. What that story might be isn't explicitly expounded on, so players get to fill in the blanks as they see fit. The grid is locked within a shop, like a kiosk, or something, in a charming urban environment somewhere like Italy or Spain, let's say. What looks like delightful bistros or ristoranti line a cobbled street populated by scooters and pleasant plant life. You can imagine wandering around town baguette under one arm, whistling a tune, catching up with friends, living la dolce vita.

And back to the game, which takes place on a 5-reel, 3-row gaming panel with 15 paylines awarding wins left to right from the first reel onwards. Despite the relaxed atmos, Fruit Shop Frenzy is a highly volatile slot, taking wagers of 10 p/c to $/€8 per paid spin. Fruit Shop Frenzy has a return to player value of 96.04% when playing 'normally', though the return figure increases a notch or two to 96.1% when buying the feature.

Fruit is one of the things linking the 3 games together, as pretty much the same pay symbols appear in all. These are 10 to A card ranks paying 3 to 9 times the bet for a 5 OAK hit, then watermelon, oranges, a lemon, a plum, and cherries as the 5 premium symbols. Hit a 5 premium symbol win, and the payouts are 12 to 100 times the stake. Helping players pull winning lines together is the Fruit Shop Frenzy logo wild. Wilds appear on reels 2, 3, and 4, substituting for all paying symbols.

Fruit Shop Frenzy: Slot Features

Whilst a simple-looking game, Fruit Shop Frenzy is slightly more sophisticated than you might suspect. Not in the base game as such, since it's basically feature free, but landing a fruit win kickstarts Fruit Shop Frenzy's chain of events.

Free Spins

When one or more winning combos made up of fruit symbols hits, 2 free spins with increasing multipliers are triggered. The multiplier increments on the multiplier bar are x1, x2, x3, x4, and x5. Each winning round awards +1 free spin and moves the multiplier bar forward +1 step.

Helper Feature

During free spins, a Helper symbol may land on the rightmost reel. When the Helper lands, it randomly activates one of these three modifiers – the multiplier values increase by +1, advancement to the next multiplier, or Frenzy mode is triggered.

Frenzy Mode

When Frenzy mode activates, 3 additional free spins are awarded, and the multiplier bar increases from 5 to 10 steps – so x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x6, x7, x8, x9, and x10. The progress of the achieved multiplier in free spins is carried over to Frenzy mode. Each winning round in Frenzy mode awards +1 free spin and furthers the multiplier bar by +1 step. Now, while Frenzy mode is active, landing a Helper symbol on the rightmost reel randomly activates one of these features – the multiplier values increase by +1, advancement to the next multiplier, 1 to 6 random wilds are added to the middle three reels, or Double X triggers which doubles the values of the multipliers on the multiplier bar.

Bonus Buy

Due to the nature of Fruit Shop Frenzy's free spins feature, it triggers fairly frequently already, but if it's not frequent enough, players can buy direct access to Frenzy Mode for the cost of 20x the bet.

Fruit Shop Frenzy: Slot Verdict

If you've been having images of NetEnt resting on its laurels, content squeezing extra mileage out of its back catalogue rather than flexing its creative muscles and dazzling a new generation of gamblers with its design talent and dazzling innovation, then Fruit Shop Frenzy is only going to reinforce those thoughts. A Megaways upgrade of an old classic made sense because, shoot, it seems like every studio and its dog are doing those, so why not get in on the action? Doing number 3 so long after the first might have seemed a bit dubious if NetEnt hadn't wedged in some new stuff to tempt players back for a third go.

The new stuff isn't half bad, either. Where the previous 2 games triggered free spins and left it about there, Fruit Shop Frenzy pushes things to the next level should the game progress to Frenzy mode. A little tricky, perhaps, cos you'll need help from the Helper symbol to do so. But if you're not in the mood to peel fruit waiting for that to happen, Frenzy Mode can be bought for the reasonable cost of 20x the bet. After playing games like Bounty Hunters recently with its 850x Showdown Spins buy feature, 20x feels like small change by comparison. Totally different bonus rounds, of course, so we are admittedly not comparing apples with apples, as it were. What makes things interesting here is that while the feature is modestly costed by modern standards, Fruit Shop Frenzy's max win of 10,868x is nevertheless a substantial target to aim for, though about half of Fruit Shop Megaways, if you were wondering.

As far as being the third slot in a series goes, Fruit Shop Frenzy is not a bad game by any means. It's got the spirit of the previous two slots while packing in extra personality and more features. Still, it might make one wonder whether NetEnt's heart is really in the game at the moment, what with all the remakes and so-so slots it had released around the time of writing, but that doesn't stop Fruit Shop Frenzy from being an amusing diversion.