Splatoon has undoubtedly been Nintendo’s most successful of its new IPs, reinventing the team-based shooter that’s often mature and militaristic for something more family-friendly and weird – and it’s no wonder that the genre’s popularity has only gotten broader with the likes of Overwatch and Fortnite targeting a teen audience with more diverse designs and colours.
Yet while the ink-based shooter is best known for its Turf War battles, where teams compete to cover the map in their colour the most, or get splatted trying, real ones know that it’s also produced some of Nintendo’s most innovative single-player campaigns that pack the same charm and level design ingenuity of a 3D Mario title. It’s nonetheless a surprise that, almost four years on from Splatoon 3’s release, the next instalment won’t be a numbered sequel but rather Splatoon Raiders, which, despite the plural in the title, is being marketed as a single-player-focused game.
Splatoon Raiders gets a new location
Away from the trendy urban hubs of Splatsville or Inkopolis, Splatoon Raiders does, however, offer a new location befitting a summer holiday: the mysterious Spirhalite Islands. While there’s still not too many details, it’s safe to infer that it shares some DNA with the mainline series’ co-op mode Salmon Run, as you’ll also be facing off against waves of mutant fish baddies called Salmonids, but where you’ll also be searching for treasure, hauling that booty back to base and using it to upgrade your gear so that you can venture to another of the islands and get even more treasure.
In other words, it sounds a lot like a looter shooter. A single-player focused looter shooter at that, which seems even rarer when most games of this type highly encourage teaming up, while the most recent trend is the even more cutthroat extraction shooter like Marathon or Escape From Tarkov, where you’re fighting others for loot and risk losing everything.
For what it’s worth, Splatoon Raiders will still let you play with up to three friends online or in local wireless (whether or not you’ll be able to matchmake with randoms is not yet confirmed), while by default you’ll also be accompanied by an AI-controlled member of Deep Cut controlling a giant bot to help you fight and dig up treasure, so you’ll never truly be alone. But knowing it’s first and foremost a single-player-focused game reassures me that I’m not trying to play the most hardcore version of the game, as anyone who’s ever tried to solo a match of Salmon Run will appreciate.
A perfect ‘unc’ game?
You might say it bucks the trend when almost every shooter is chasing the multiplayer live service rainbow – you could even argue it’s quite ironically old-school for a game where you’re playing squid kids after the latest fashionable threads and weapons. That isn’t to say that your mechanic’s going to be dressed like your uncle, though it’s surely no coincidence that the contraptions you’ll be constructing out of junk procured from your missions seem to carry the air of an old mad scientist.
But if this makes Splatoon Raiders an ‘unc game’ (like in Uncle, as in Boomer), then I’m all for it. Having spent each successive instalment of Splatoon struggling to keep up with its presumably young and nimble playerbase, I’ve long lost my competitive edge. In team-based or co-op affairs, there’s also the pressure of being the weakest link that others have to carry due to my lesser skill or suboptimal loadout. It’s not that there isn’t magic when playing together, but more than ever, my comfort games are single-player experiences where I just have the freedom to progress, fail and succeed on my own terms, taking my time with missions or figuring out my builds.
Besides, if it means a finite but focused experience that nonetheless gives plenty of room for customisation and replayable challenges – much like Pragmata, another certified ‘unc game’ and my favourite of the year so far – then I can see this Splatoon spin-off becoming a summer highlight.
Splatoon Raiders will release 27 July. Find more details on the Nintendo website.
