Developer Pragmatic Play empties the fruit bowl for a sequel to their highly successful grid slot Fruit Party. Packing all the right ingredients to produce sufficient gaming, and becoming one of Pragmatic's most iconic releases to date, the original Fruit Party seems to have made a lasting impression on players in spite of its somewhat generic looks. It did what it did, occasionally causing a frisson of excitement, though we won't blame you if you're asking yourself what the big deal is. In any case, Pragmatic Play has left the cosmetics largely intact for the sequel, focusing on math model and feature tweaks to tempt players back for a return visit.
One thing Pragmatic Play has done is to sharpen the background imagery. Fruit Party 2 is located in a similar countryside location, yet the fruit trees and cottage have a more defined look, less hazy, less dreamy than before. The same-sized grid returns, meaning a 7x7 game panel, dropping in 49 fruit dominated symbols with every spin. Like the original, Fruit Party 2 is warmly inviting, and kind of generic but gets the job done to an adequate degree.
The math model is one area where a few noticeable changes have taken place. Volatility, for one, has been tightened to a high setting giving the game extra bite, as has the default RTP (slightly), which now comes in at 96.53%. Players may set a stake from 20 p/c to $/€100 per spin, and the fruit fiesta is available on any type of device.
Fruit Party 2 uses a cluster pays system where 5 or more matching symbols connecting horizontally or vertically constitute a win, increasing in value the bigger they get. The most valuable clusters are made up of 15 or more identical symbols, worth 150x the bet for strawberries, descending through oranges, apples, grapes, plums, stars and hearts. One of Fruit Party's new additions is the inclusion of a wild symbol. Not only do wild symbols land anywhere to substitute all pay symbols, but they also appear with multipliers, covered next.
The first extra to go over is the tumble feature, which follows every win. Winning clusters are removed from the board to let new ones drop into the empty spaces. Tumbles keep tumbling, creating consecutive wins until no new clusters appear.
When the tumble feature removes a cluster, there is a chance a wild symbol drops into one of the gaps. As well as substituting symbols, wilds also possess multipliers starting at x2. Wilds may appear again in a tumble sequence; each time they do, the multiplier doubles up to a maximum in the base game of x256. If more than 1 wild symbol is part of a winning cluster, their values are added together before being applied, and wilds can be used in multiple clusters at the same time.
Golden fruits are your ticket to the bonus round as 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7 of them in view award 10, 12, 15, 20, or 25 free spins, plus a payout of 3, 5, 10, 20, or 100 times the stake, respectively. Landing 3 scatters during the feature awards +5 additional spins to the remaining amount with no retrigger limit. During the feature, wild multipliers start with x3 instead of x2, going all the way up to 729x.
Where permitted, Fruit Party 2 now provides a bonus buy option to bypass the base game for players not in the mood. With a price tag of 100x the bet, 3-7 scatters land to award players anywhere from 10 to 25 free spins.
Well, it's not a paradigm shift, but there are a few changes separating part one Fruit Party from part two. Are they enough to get majorly excited about? Yes and no. On the whole, Fruit Party 2 plays out in a manner very close to the previous one. The thinking seems to be, take the original, increase a few of its settings and ship it as a sequel. It is sound thinking in some ways, though not one that promotes major excitement unless part one was a real top five favourite.
One area which surprisingly hasn't budged, and is odd for a sequel, is winning potential. Despite the free spin retriggers and massive multipliers, the most you can win from Fruit Party 2 remains 5,000x the bet. A fair total, to be sure, no one's knocking the number, yet a juicier top prize would have added allure to the sequel and made more sense. It also would have given wild multipliers a greater chance to make better use of their much-expanded capabilities.
Let's not be overly critical though, Fruit Party 2 has more positive aspects than negatives. Positive is one way of describing the game's atmosphere, with its colourful graphics and bubbly musical beat. Pinning multipliers on wilds works like a charm here as it does elsewhere, and their values can get bigger than most. It makes for perfectly fine gaming when the going's good.
While Pragmatic Play has built a game for players who prefer a bit more volatility in their fruit-filled grid slots, it doesn't make an impression in the way that the likes of Jammin' Jars 2 or Hacksaw Gaming's Hop'n'Pop did. Multipliers can be massive, but if there is one thing Fruit Party lacked, it was a flaming individual spark to really drive it apart from the competition. The gaming was a tad generic, the experience a little forgettable, a fate its sequel suffers from as well.
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