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5 hours ago
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Splatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooting games whose paint-splattered turf war nature means being bad at shooting is just as valuable as – if not more so than – being good. It is also blessed with an abundance of personality, with vibrant characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only dream of achieving. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.
The first spinoff in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is advertised as a single player-focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play through the entire game solo just fine – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed cooperatively with up to three others. Players start each session on a hideout ship where they can upgrade their equipment and tweak their play style before heading out on bite-sized repeatable missions, and this structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping out strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works towards creating their ultimate squid-kid avatar of chaos.
Playing Splatoon Raiders solo feels like a lesser experience for this reason. Its levels are straightforwardly constructed to keep groups together. There is little of the puzzly rush of finding hidden depths with creative use of your tools. Instead, the fun is in putting together your kit. Splatoon’s weapons have always been goofy and playfully designed, but even better is learning how this new entry complements them with a suite of augmentable gadgets. As your options accrete and the game escalates in challenge, Raiders comes to life.
Some may not get that far. Splatoon Raiders takes a long time to make it clear how completely the experience can change with the right kit, and while it offers a decent variety of challenges to tackle, players are meant to replay them. The minimal story, in which you are an unnamed mechanic stranded on a mysterious archipelago with the band Deep Cut (returning from Splatoon 3), is not terribly compelling. Which is surprising for a series with a history of casually revealing outrageous new details about its post-climate apocalypse world and its human-cephalopod inhabitants.
Splatoon is Nintendo at its most offbeat, venturing forth in a direction few other game studios travel. And, according to sales, audiences outside of the company’s native Japan seem to struggle with how to receive it. In this context, Splatoon Raiders feels like a concession: Nintendo taking aside one of its rangier, peculiar creations and asking it to be a bit more normal. This is the biggest surprise about Splatoon Raiders: it is pedestrian. If you’ve played one of dozens of modern cooperative action games, you’ve played this. You have upgraded your gear and compared weapon stats and divined synergies between abilities in order to throw your character into the meat grinder over and over again, watching overwhelming hordes eventually become trivial as your stats improve, your arsenal more varied. There is only so much that Splatoon’s ink-fuelled weaponry and charming DIY design sensibilities can do to elevate this experience. Like its archipelago setting, Splatoon Raiders is far removed from what makes the main series so charming, and what’s left here feels a bit too much like watching paint dry.
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Splatoon Raiders is out 23 July; £41.99
