Platooners is ELK Studios’ 2018 action slot, and the joke is right in the setup: three armed movie stars are shooting a jungle war film on a Hollywood lot. We cover how the platooners slot plays, its Action Spins and snake-battle bonus, and where to spin the free demo.
It runs five reels with 178 connecting ways and brings back the cast of ELK’s earlier Bloopers — only now they fire rockets at the reels between takes. The top prize on set is 250,000 coins.
How Platooners Plays
The setting is a film studio dressed as a jungle: backdrops, cameras and lights frame the reels while the three Platooners wait off-screen, fully armed and a little too eager for their scene.
Wins pay across 178 connecting ways on five reels, with bets from $0.20 up to $100 a spin. The game was designed mobile-first, so it plays just as cleanly on a phone as on desktop.
That 178-way engine is shared studio DNA — Wild Toro, ELK’s award-winning bullfight slot runs the same maths under a very different chase.
The symbols and pacing stay deliberately simple — the personality lives in the interruptions, when one of the stars decides the take needs another go. ELK Studios’ action-led catalogue leans on exactly this kind of character-driven design.
Action Spins
Action Spins are the signature. After any spin, one of the three Platooners can wander on set and fire his weapon as the reels start spinning again — and every interruption works in our favour.
Between them, the trio’s rockets, machine guns and grenades deliver three kinds of help:
- Respins — the reels fire again at no extra cost.
- Additional wilds — extra wilds are blasted onto the grid before it settles.
- Five-of-a-kind paylines — a full line of matching symbols is forced onto the board.
Because any of the three can appear at any time, the base game carries a constant background chance of a rescue — which is what keeps the high-variance maths watchable between bonuses.
The Snakes of Fortune Bonus
The bonus game cuts to the action scene itself: the Platooners face the Snakes of Fortune, and every snake is loaded with coin wins and mysterious bonus coins.
Those mystery coins are the strategy layer. They can reveal bigger wins, additional ammunition, increased attack power, or bombs that go off when the snake finally explodes.
Defeat a snake and the fight escalates: the Platooners’ weapons grow more powerful, and a stronger, considerably more valuable snake slithers in to replace it. The deeper a run goes, the richer each stage becomes — a proper multi-level boss ladder rather than a flat free-spins round.
RTP, Volatility and What to Expect
Platooners runs a 96.3% RTP, comfortably above the 96% average and a strong number for a feature-led action game from 2018.
The volatility sits high, so the Action Spins carry the base game between bigger hits while the snake bonus holds the real swings. It belongs firmly in the high-volatility bracket of our catalogue.
The ceiling is 250,000 coins — 2,500x the maximum bet — and the realistic route there is a deep, multi-snake run through the Snakes of Fortune with upgraded weapons.
Playing Platooners Free in Demo Mode
You can play Platooners free in demo mode before staking anything. The demo runs the full production — Action Spins, the snake bonus and all three stars — in-browser with no download or registration.
A few demo takes are worth it to see how often the Platooners interrupt and how quickly the bonus escalates. For more no-stakes spins, our free action-slot demos line up similar titles.
Platooners FAQs
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Final Verdict
Platooners is a charming, character-led ELK slot that turns the studio’s old Bloopers cast into an action unit. The Action Spins keep the base game alive, and the snake bonus has genuine depth for its era.
We would recommend it to players who like personality-driven slots and escalating bonus rounds at high variance, with the above-average 96.3% RTP as a quiet point in its favour.
For ELK’s other register, Avalon Gold, ELK’s Arthurian Mystery-Box slot trades the jungle film set for an expanding-grid treasure hunt, while Platooners keeps its edge in those armed interruptions.
For the studio’s other retro experiment, Route 777, ELK’s dot-matrix road-trip slot swaps jungle warfare for a desert highway and a skull-collect Fortune Wheel.
