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My kids absolutely love Splatoon 3. They play all the time on their Switches, and my older kid said to me that he thinks the Salmon Run part of Splatoon 3, which features co-op survival against waves of oncoming mutant salmon enemies, is the best players-versus-enemy shooter that exists.
Splatoon Raiders, exclusive to the Switch 2 and available this week, isn’t a Splatoon 3 replacement or true sequel. It isn’t even designed to be. But if you loved those Salmon Run parts of Splatoon 3, this is like a whole lot more of that in one big standalone package. It’s beautiful-looking, it runs smooth and fast, and I’ve gotten sucked in after a week of playing. But Splatoon 4 it’s not, and that tells us a lot about how Nintendo has been treating the Switch 2 in its first year.
Splatoon Raiders leaves the big city of the last games and explores a series of islands where a small crew (Deep Cut, the band from the other Splatoon games) is lost on a rickety home-base ship, stranded at the Spirhalite Islands. Trips to these islands, infested with those mutant Salmonids, are made along with a little robo-mech companion bot. In battles, that bot helps you shoot a bit, and it’s also a base you can jump on to catapult into the air. Gameplay-wise, though, it’s similar to the other games: shooting, gyro-based aiming and diving into your paint to recharge.
I love how Splatoon 3 has multiple game modes, offering lots of ways to play on and offline. There are the classic player-versus-player arena battles that involve laying paint down to cover territories, but there’s also a single-player story mode, a co-op survival Salmon Run mode, a tower-based challenge game in a DLC add-on and even a little puzzle game.
Splatoon Raiders is all a single-player adventure, a series of island-hopping contained level challenges that alternate between treasure-hunting map battles, time-based survival battles against increasingly hard enemies, and “dungeons” with puzzle-like obstacles you have to make it past with limited weapons.
The whole game can be played solo, or you can invite three others to join in co-op to play any part with you: a planned expedition with friends, or calling up strangers to hop in and help you if you need an extra boost.
I found myself stuck on some levels, losing and replaying over and over. The good news is that extra weapons, bonus power-ups and leveling-up experience get collected even when you lose, so grinding to get more powerful is absolutely part of the design.
There are a lot more ways to customize and power up weapons in Raiders, and a lot of that happens by spending collected crystals and other extras to build a floating-ship home base to larger sizes with more workbenches that can tinker with your gear. A bunch of different ink-shooting weapons, much like Splatoon 3’s, can get power upgrades now. You can add three different tanks for ink that also have different advantages (speed, power and tactical) and add different types of “gadgets” to those tanks that have extra attacks and can be assigned to the Switch 2’s shoulder buttons. You can also add slots for extra badge powers that can give particular advantages in fights or for survival.
It’s fun to tinker, and it’s clear that customizing your gear is a big part of this game. I kind of miss the simplicity of Splatoon’s original core paint-territory splat battles. But that’s what Splatoon 3 is for, and even Nintendo seems to acknowledge that you’ll likely go back to that game even if you own Raiders. Splatoon Raiders feels more like a big special DLC add-on, packaged as its own game.
Does that sort of represent the Switch 2 conundrum right now? While the $450 (soon to be $500) Switch 2 is excellent, it’s still not necessary. And many millions more people own Switches than Switch 2s. Maybe that’s why no true Mario or Zelda sequel has hit Switch 2 yet. Many of the Switch 2’s exclusives of the last year feel more like quirky spin-offs than true sequels, Mario Kart World included.
Do I think Splatoon Raiders is good? Yes, very much so. But it’ll never be Splatoon 3. For $50, it earns its value. But it makes me wonder when Splatoon 4 will truly arrive, and when Nintendo will truly commit to big franchise sequels on the Switch 2.
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