101 Candies: Slot Overview

Ever since NetEnt was acquired by Evolution, it’s hard not to notice the studio leaning into food-themed releases. Post-deal we’ve seen titles like Cupcakes, Milkshake XXXtreme, Taco Fury XXXtreme, and Fruit Shop Frenzy. Now there’s another sugary addition: 101 Candies. True to its title, 101 Candies is a cluster-paying grid slot wrapped in a candy-coated theme, featuring a conveyor of wild multipliers alongside several special Feature Coin symbols and free spins to pile on the, well, sweetness. How sweet does it get? Let’s dig in.

Visually, 101 Candies gives off a bit of a Fruit Shop Megaways vibe, with the game grid positioned beside a vehicle parked somewhere out in the countryside. The presentation isn’t particularly impressive. It has a slick, glossy finish that feels a little rushed, as though it was hurriedly polished up and doesn’t land a strong first impression. Anyone who’s felt NetEnt’s recent output has been uneven won’t find much reassurance when 101 Candies loads up.

That said, strong mechanics can sometimes override a shaky first look, so it’s worth continuing. Spoiler: if you’re into intense, high-energy cluster payers, 101 Candies may come across as a bit restrained. Part of that is down to its low-medium volatility math model, offered in multiple RTP versions, with the top option set at 96.08%. Players can choose to buy the free spins feature or simply wager 20 p/c to $/€120 per paid game round. Each round drops 49 symbols onto a 7×7 gaming board, and wins land when at least 5 matching symbols connect horizontally or vertically.

Any winning cluster is cleared via the Avalanche feature, after which new symbols fall in from above to fill the empty spaces. Avalanche sequences continue until no further winning cluster forms. The paytable is all sweets, all the time. At the lower end are 6 unwrapped candy symbols, while the 3 premium symbols stand out because they come in packets. A 5-of-a-kind cluster pays 0.05 to 0.15 times the bet, increasing to 2 to 30 times the bet for clusters sized 12+.

101 Candies: Slot Features

The cluster payouts aren’t among the biggest out there, but 101 Candies leans on the Wild Conveyor mechanic, Feature Coin symbols, free spins, and a buy option to give wins a boost.

Wild Conveyor Feature

In both the base game and free spins, a Wild Conveyor holding wild symbols sits above the reels. Each wild carries a multiplier from x2 to x101 at the most, and as new wilds enter the Wild Conveyor to fill gaps, they typically arrive with increasing values. With every Avalanche, the leftmost wild symbol on the Wild Conveyor moves to the grid, replacing a symbol on the reels, while the remaining wilds shift left and a fresh wild appears on the far right. 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 can substitute for any regular pay symbol, and their multiplier is applied to the cluster win. If multiple wilds contribute to the same win, their multipliers are added together before being used.

Feature Coin Symbols

During an Avalanche, a random Feature Coin can drop onto the grid, triggering its corresponding feature. Feature Coins activate and then vanish from the reels in an Avalanche before a wild symbol transfers from the Wild Conveyor onto the reels.

• The Upgrade symbol raises the multipliers of all wild symbols by 1, up to a maximum of x101.
• The Destroy symbol eliminates 5 wild symbols from the Wild Conveyor.
• The Scramble symbol mixes up all wild symbols on the Wild Conveyor.
• The Transform symbol selects a random symbol on the reels and swaps every instance of it for another symbol. It does not select scatters or wilds.

Free Spins

Scatter symbols may appear on the initial spin in the base game as well as during Avalanches. Landing 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 scatters awards 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, or 15 free spins, respectively. During free spins, the Wild Conveyor resets once at the start of the round; beyond that, the same rules as the base game are used.

Buy Feature

Players can purchase free spins for 100x the bet. When bought, the feature awards 10 to 15 free spins.

101 Candies: Slot Verdict

If you didn’t know the developer, you could easily assume 101 Candies came from a newer studio rather than a long-established name like NetEnt. Sure, not every release needs to be a polished, headline-grabbing masterpiece that wows everyone. Even with that in mind, 101 Candies feels average by NetEnt standards. It looks budget, it played painfully slowly, and it simply wasn’t especially entertaining. The mechanics didn’t do enough to compensate for the weak visuals, and by the end of testing, the main reaction it produced was relief that it was over.

There are positives, though, and the core idea behind the Wild Conveyor is genuinely clever. Watching wild multipliers get pushed onto the grid while Avalanches bring in rising values is a neat concept. Unfortunately, those multipliers are paired with fairly modest cluster payouts. Time and again, a decent multiplier would land, only to connect with a small cluster and end up paying something like 3 or 4 times the bet, or around that. Sometimes less. With 49 symbols on the board, capping clusters at 12+ also felt surprisingly restrictive. The max win is restricted too, topping out at 3,580x the bet. It’s not the worst ceiling out there, but considering how often wild multipliers appear and that they can reach up to x101, the max win ends up feeling out of sync with the game’s multiplier-heavy presentation.

Credit to NetEnt’s maths team, then, for fitting in so much multiplier potential while still keeping the overall output on a relatively short leash. 101 Candies may appeal to players who like to play in the lower-mid volatility range, but the sluggish tempo and unimpressive visuals could be a tough sell, even for the audience it’s aimed at.