Splatoon Raiders: A Spin-Off That Struggles to Capture the Original’s Charm
SPlatoon is among Nintendo’s most ingenious inventions of the last decade: a series of shooters whose paint-splattered turf war nature means that being bad at shooting is just as valuable, if not more so, than being good at it. It’s also blessed with abundant personality, 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.
Splatoon Raiders: The Single-Player Spin-Off
The first spin-off of the ink-soaked franchise, Splatoon Raiders is billed as a single-player focused entry in this primarily multiplayer series. While this is true enough – one can play the entire game very well solo – Raiders is clearly best enjoyed in co-op with up to three others. Players begin each session on a hidden ship where they can upgrade their equipment and refine their playstyle before embarking on small, repeatable missions. This structure is tailor-made for teaming up with friends or helping strangers (the game lets you do either), as each person works to create their ultimate avatar of chaos, a squid child.
Playing Splatoon Raiders solo feels like a lesser experience for this reason. Its levels are simply built to keep groups together. There’s not much of the rush of finding hidden depths through creative use of your tools. Instead, the fun is in putting together your kit. Splatoon’s weapons have always been designed in a wacky and fun way, but it’s even better to learn how this new entry complements them with a suite of augmentable gadgets. As your options pile up and the game gets harder and harder, Raiders comes to life.
Gadgets bring the game to life… Splatoon Raiders.
The Challenges of Splatoon Raiders
Some may not go that far. Splatoon Raiders takes a long time to explain how completely the experience can change with the right kit, and while it offers a good variety of challenges to complete, players are expected to replay them. The minimal story, in which you play as an anonymous mechanic stranded on a mysterious archipelago with the Deep Cut group (returning from Splatoon 3), is not terribly compelling. Which is surprising for a series whose story revolves around casually revealing scandalous new details about its post-climate apocalypse world and its human-cephalopod inhabitants.
The Essence of Splatoon and Its Reception
Splatoon is Nintendo at its most offbeat, venturing in a direction few other game studios have taken. And, based on sales, audiences outside of the company’s native Japan seem to have a hard time knowing how to receive it. In this context, Splatoon Raiders feels like a concession: Nintendo shelving one of its strangest and most peculiar creations and asking it to be a little more normal.
That’s the biggest surprise of Splatoon Raiders: it’s pedestrian. If you’ve played any of the dozens of modern cooperative action games, you’ve played this one. You’ve upgraded your gear, compared weapon stats, and guessed synergies between abilities in order to throw your character through the meat grinder over and over again, watching overwhelming hordes eventually become trivial as your stats improve and your arsenal becomes more varied. Splatoon’s ink-powered weapons and charming DIY design sensibilities can only do so much to elevate this experience. Like its archipelago setting, Splatoon Raiders is a far cry from what made the main series so charming, and what’s left here feels a little too much like watching paint dry.
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