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Splatoon is one of Nintendo’s most brilliant creations of the last decade: a shooter whose color means being bad at shooting is just as important as – if not more than – being good. It’s also blessed with a lot of personality, with strong characters, a richly imagined world, and a hipness that the competition can only aspire to achieve. Unfortunately, Splatoon Raiders makes it difficult to remember all of this.
The first installment in the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is heralded as the single-player focus of this multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play alone in all games just fine – the Raiders are best enjoyed in partnership with the other three. Players start each stage in a hideout where they can upgrade their weapons and change their gameplay before embarking on repetitive missions, and the system is designed to team up with friends or help strangers (the game allows you to do so), as each character tries to create an avatar of a chaotic squid baby.
Playing solo Splatoon Raiders feels like a bit of a letdown for this reason. The standards are designed to keep groups together. There’s an incredible urgency to finding hidden depths through skillful use of your tools. Instead, the fun is putting your tools away. The weapons of Splatoon have always been beautiful and designed in the game, but the best thing is to learn how this new entry supports them with additional weapons. As your options increase and the game becomes more intense, Raiders comes to life.
Some may not go that far. Splatoon Raiders takes a long time to show how the action can be changed with the right equipment, and although it offers different challenges to overcome, the players have to give them back. The sub-story, in which you are an unnamed mechanic on a mysterious island with the Deep Cut group (returning from Splatoon 3), is not very compelling. Which is surprising for a series that has a history of randomly revealing new information about the apocalypse-era world and its inhabitants.
Splatoon is Nintendo at its worst, heading in a direction few other studios tread. And, in terms of sales, the company’s native Japanese audience seems to be struggling with how to receive it. In this context, Splatoon Raiders feels like a confession: Nintendo is taking one of its products, exotic creatures and asking it to be exotic. This is the biggest surprise of Splatoon Raiders: they are pedestrians. If you’ve ever played one of the modern cooperative action games, you have. You’ve upgraded your weapons and compared weapon stats and skill connections to throw your character into a meat grinder over and over again, looking for more factions eventually becomes less and less as your stats improve, your weapons vary. There’s only so much that Splatoon’s inking kits and cute DIY skills can do to top it off. Like its islands, Splatoon Raiders is far from what makes the main series so attractive, and what’s left here feels like watching paint dry.
