I would give it a 9, but a few things knock it down a peg for me:

1. Three player co-op? For real? I was excited to play this with three of my brothers, since we commonly play 4-player games online, like Borderlands, Dokapon Kingdom, Super Mario 3D World, Baldur’s Gate 3 and recently FFXIV, but hearing this would only support three players was soul crushing. I get that it’s a single player focused game, but if you’re going to do co-op, why restrict it to three players?

2. Unlocking 3 limiters while spending 1 skill point for each stat, then suddenly needing to pay 2 SP to have the stat go up by the same amount genuinely made me angry. If I could change this, I would rebalance it in a way that you get level ups more frequently, but have to spend more skill points earlier on, but still ultimately have the exp required to reach max level be the same.

3. Visually, this looks like it was probably developed for Switch 1, but midway through development, Nintendo decided to make it a Switch 2 exclusive to bolster the lineup of exclusives, like they did with Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza. The only real difference here is we have something to compare it to visually, and it only looks slightly more impressive than Splatoon 3. This is probably my most minor nitpick though, because the game runs smooth at all times, and loads very quickly, which is very important for a stage-based game like this.

All that being said, I still love the game, and it makes me worry that whatever single player campaign we get in Splatoon 4 won’t be nearly as good. Also, whenever I do go back to mainline Splatoon, I’m going to miss my boomerang! I hope that, as a boomerang does, it comes back in Splatoon 4 as a sub-weapon!