Splatoon Raiders Is A Bold Rethink Of What Makes A Splatoon Game

Splatoon has always featured single-player campaigns, but they’ve never been the focus. Often they’re glorified tutorials, and even when they venture into more clever puzzle-platformer territory, it’s been a relatively short side dish to the competitive-multiplayer main course. Splatoon Raiders looks to address this by putting the single-player focus front and center. Multiplayer is here, but it’s deemphasized and co-op only. In some ways, that makes Raiders the mirror image of most Splatoon games.

I recently tried out Splatoon Raiders, sampling some of the early-game progression along with a later co-op raid in multiplayer. While this is still undeniably a Splatoon game, it’s a very different one with a particular emphasis on making a build that feels downright broken as you take down increasingly tough hordes of salmonids. 

To start, you have your regular arsenal that is largely recognizable from previous Splatoon games–your regular paint blasters that fire like traditional guns, along with more inventive paint-sloshing weaponry like rollers and sloshers, which cover the ground in paint more quickly. I stuck mostly with the traditional weapons, mostly because I was just learning the ropes, but also because weapons like rollers just seemed less useful in this context. Those are great for a team composition in multiplayer Splatoon where your goal is to cover as much ground with paint as possible, but their utility is less obvious in a PvE game that’s focused on taking down enemies. You do still need to cover the ground in paint to quickly move around the battlefield, but the combat zones are relatively small, so covering them completely isn’t as important. There may be use cases I just didn’t find in my limited time, however. 

Aside from your regular weapons, you also have Gadgets, which are sorted into three Tank types: Power, Speed, and Tactical. You have to pick just one of those categories to use, but you can swap between stages. All of your Gadgets fall under one of those three buckets, and you can equip two of them at a time within that category, mapping them to the shoulder buttons. The Tactical kit has an auto-turret called the Shot Pot, for example, while the Power set lets you generate a spinning array of ink blobs (“Splatellites”) that circle around you and deal damage to enemies. 

At first I was cautious about my Gadget use, saving them for bigger engagements, but the cooldown is quick and the salmonids are ferocious. It’s clear that Splatoon Raiders wants you to use them liberally, so after getting warmed up a bit, I was hitting my spinning Power attack at every opportunity, acting like a passive-damage-dealing shield to complement my shooting. I knew then and there that my ultimate goal would be to reduce the cooldown and extend the effect time as much as possible to make it, if not infinite, at least as close as possible. It’s not really Vampire Survivors, but it’s not not Vampire Survivors.

Upgrading and supporting your Gadget loadout is the major driver in the loot loop of Splatoon Raiders. As you level up your character, you can upgrade their health or damage, but also their capacity for Gadget modifiers. Most of the loot you find in the stages are different modifiers for your Gadgets, to let you upgrade damage or tweak its effects. It’s a very flexible system and even in my limited time I could see the potential for building out a combo of traditional weapons and powered-up Gadgets that feels OP–at least until you hit the next challenge milestone.

Rounding out your combat options are Relics, equippable items with even bigger effects like enabling a double jump. Finally, you can bring one of your Deep Cut crew with you to pilot the protective machine that accompanies you into each mission, and which one you pick determines a charged-up ultimate Showstopper attack that you actually should save for boss encounters. Big Man, for example, spawns a giant shark that cuts a huge path across the battlefield. 

All of these options come together to make your perfect little inkling killing machine, venturing out into an array of islands that unlock across new islands as you complete story missions on the world map. These missions function like battle arenas with some light platforming elements. You might need to call over your cohort to give you a boost, but for the most part, these seemed to be traveling between skirmishes. Those play out like horde battles with massive numbers of salmonids attacking you, along with new “seasoned” salmonids that are visibly covered with salt and are much tougher than their regular counterparts. 

From the little that I played, Splatoon Raiders gets mileage out of even just the handful of salmonids I encountered, by both increasing the numbers of the horde and rearranging its pieces. One salmonid occupies a giant tower that has to be cut down to size before you can defeat it, another is a giant lumbering brute, and so on. One stage may require you to take on just one of each, while another strategically positions the sniper towers so it’s difficult to reach one without being exposed to the other. Another wrinkle might add a bigger, slower boss to deal with, forcing tense decision-making about which threats to eliminate first. It can get chaotic, but that’s what makes it so satisfying to use all the combat options at your disposal to mop up the battlefield.

There is a general sense that Splatoon Raiders is an example of Nintendo using every part of the buffalo, as the saying goes. The character designs, some enemies, weapons, and the world of Splatoon are well established, of course, but I was surprised to be reminded of the recent Donkey Kong Bananza. This game doesn’t have Bananza’s destructibility, but you end stages by mining crystals, and the clink-clink of collecting them very much reminded me of Donkey Kong’s latest–as did the concept of drilling into the ground to progress into a deeper cave in some stages.

We also tried a multiplayer skirmish, which was, as you might expect, a lot more frantic with more enemies to match the increased player count. The core is somewhat similar to Salmon Run from Splatoon 2–though as with the single-player missions, you’re moving around the map a good deal more to find different engagements, and your prize is new Gadget modifiers for loot. 

The real treat here was seeing how players could start to synergize with each other. My Power-focused build was good for getting in close to enemies and dealing heavy damage, but I wasn’t especially hearty, so I could rely on my teammates to take some of the heat off while venturing into the thick of the enemy horde. Combined with the wealth of options for your Gadgets and gear, multiplayer seems like a fertile ground for high-level raids against tough opponents, which then would cash out with appropriately better loot. 

Splatoon Raiders has a nice combat loop built around grinding for loot to get stronger and then using that to experiment with new builds and take on even tougher foes. That seems like more than enough to sustain it through a story campaign. The lingering question in my mind is how much longevity the co-op multiplayer will have to sustain continued raids with your friends after you’ve wrapped up most of the challenges. Previous Splatoon games were built with long-term competitive multiplayer in mind, with all of the infinite replayability that comes with it. The switch to a single-player focus may mean that Splatoon Raiders is content to let you finish the campaign and be done with it, so it remains to be seen if co-op raids for ever-increasing builds will give it similarly long legs. That makes it a big change for a series built on multiplayer, but as someone who has always wanted a more focused single-player Splatoon experience, I’m excited to see it finally deliver.