Fruit Shop Pokie Machine
Although we are used to seeing video pokies covered with fruit symbols, few of them look anything like Net Ents’ brightly-coloured Fruit Shop game that has a crisp, simple design accompanied by an equally simple yet unique, bonus feature. It’s a classically-styled 5 reel game that has 15 permanently activated paylines running from the left side and in the normal run of things winning combinations are made up of matching symbols running across one of these lines on adjacent reels.
The bright colours make the Fruit Shop video pokie stand out, with reels having plain white backings, an orange and white shop awning over the top of them and a simple backdrop of green grass and a blue sky setting it all off. While Net Ent are perfectly capable of producing sophisticated pokies with flashy 3D graphics and weird and wonderful bonus rounds, they have deliberately kept thing simple here and symbols are in a plain cartoon style.
The low limit that can be placed on a spin of the reels has been set at 0.15 which should be fine for most players, although there’s an option to try things out on free Fruit Shop video pokies at most casinos. High rollers will be pleased to see that the maximum stake is a generous 150.00 per spin.
Fruit Shop
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Playing Fruit Shop
Not all of the symbols are directly related to fruit, as the smaller value winlines will be created when the playing card 10, J, Q, K or A land across lines. These are in a bright blue colour which doesn’t seem to fit in with the theme at all, but they certainly stand out. Wins range from 5, 10 or 50x the line stake when the 10 appears on a payline to 15, 50 or 150x for getting the A on 3, 4 or 5 reels.
The watermelon, orange, lemon and plum are each worth more and more but in a reversal of normal pokie practice, the top value symbol is the cherries. This pays 5x when stopping on reels 1 and 2, rising to 25 and 300 when it’s on 3 or 4 reels of a line and as the cherry on the cake, it’s worth a huge 2000x if it fills all 5 positions of a payline.
Although it doesn’t have any coin value, the Fruit Shop logo is still a rewarding symbol as it’s a wildcard, able to replace all others to complete winning combinations. If players see a matching symbol on reels 1 and 3 for example and the wild logo is on the same payline on reel 2, it will substitute for the missing symbol and still count for a win, while a line of 3 or 4 symbols can be extended across the reels on the right side for a higher-value payout. Anytime a winning line is completed by the wild symbol, the base value is doubled.
Bonus Features
There’s no separate bonus round in this game but it’s compensated for by a unique way that some free spins are triggered. Any time 3, 4 or 5 of a matching fruit symbol create a winning combination, the reels spin for free and once again, all wins are doubled in value during the extra games, while the reels turn orange just to ensure that people know they are in a free spins round.
If 3, 4 or 5 of a fruit symbol landed, players receive 1, 2 or 5 free spins respectively, although just 2 cherries are needed to trigger 1 bonus game. This isn’t a randomly-triggered feature as it happens with every fruit winning line and if more fruit create a win during the bonus games, extra spins are added on to the end of any still left to play out.
The Verdict
While this isn’t a typical Net Ent game in appearance, it’s got the usual high-value bonus features that they seem to specialise in. The bright colours and bold graphics make it stand out somewhat and a fun cartoon style makes it a very welcoming online casino pokie.
Wins in the base game tend to be little and often rather than just a few bigger prizes, which is what most players prefer, but once a fruit symbol makes up a winline and those higher-value free games are triggered there’s some decent payouts, although it’s not guaranteed of course, that the bonus games will land a winning combination.
Throw in the wild substitutions, complete with multipliers and it should be no surprise to find that the Fruit Shop video pokie has become one of the biggest hits for Net Ent, even though it isn’t mobile-optimised.