Reel Rush

NetEnt built Reel Rush on an oddly shaped board for its time, using a 1-3-4-3-1 row pattern across five reels rather than a uniform grid — a setup that later resurfaced in titles like Yggdrasil's Valley of the Gods. First released in 2013, and rebuilt in HTML5 in 2018 so it plays across desktop and mobile alike, the game pairs a bright candy-shop art style with an upbeat, retro-game soundtrack. Betting runs from 0.50 up to 100 per spin.

Wins need three or more matching symbols starting on the very first reel, which only holds a single symbol position at the start of any spin. The paytable is built from confectionery: rounded low-pay sweets fill out the bottom tier, while five classic fruit icons — plums, grapes, watermelons, lemons, pineapples and strawberries — form the premium set, paying 100 to 1,000 coins for five of a kind. A golden wild lands only on the middle three reels, carries no payout of its own, and substitutes for every other symbol in a winning line.

Every win triggers a respin, and each respin removes two blocker tiles from the board, opening up more space and increasing the number of ways to win as it goes: the first respin brings the total to 135 ways, climbing through 405, 675 and 1,125 to 1,875 ways by the fifth. A win on any of those respins clears two further blockers and grants another respin, and the sequence keeps extending itself as long as new wins keep landing — it only stops once a spin fails to produce a winner, sending play back to the base game.

Should a win land on that fifth and final respin, the reward is 8 free spins played out on a completely open 5x5 grid for the full duration of the round, running at the maximum 3,125 ways to win throughout. That's also where Reel Rush's biggest payouts tend to land, with the game topping out at 962x the stake, a medium volatility rating, a hit frequency of 28.29%, and an RTP of 96.96%.