Splatoon Raiders: thank cod it’s not a roguelike
I'm sure it was exceedingly tempting for the team behind Splatoon Raiders to make the game into a roguelike. After all, the very design of the game arguably lends itself particularly well to what we today understand as "the roguelike formula"... even if that has, over the years, somewhat diverged from the original meaning of...
I’m sure it was exceedingly tempting for the team behind Splatoon Raiders to make the game into a roguelike. After all, the very design of the game arguably lends itself particularly well to what we today understand as “the roguelike formula”… even if that has, over the years, somewhat diverged from the original meaning of the term.
But no! They decided to make a hand-crafted game with deliberately designed challenges, a solid sense of structure and progression, and the result is a highly entertaining game — particularly for those of us who have always rather liked Splatoon in principle, but have never ended up sticking with the competitive multiplayer side of things for one reason or another.
Yes, they absolutely delivered on providing a solid single-player Splatoon experience, and I’d like to talk about that a bit more. So join me after the jump and let’s do just that.
Lest you are reading this in the far future, do not follow anything Nintendo-related or have no reason to know what Splatoon Raiders is, a brief recap: Splatoon Raiders for Switch 2 is the fourth entry in the Splatoon series — which began on Wii U and really hit its stride on Switch — and in contrast to its three predecessors, it has no competitive multiplayer mode. Consequently, it is positioned as something of a “spinoff” rather than a “sequel”, hence the fact it is not called Splatoon 4.
Instead, the game’s primarily single-player campaign casts you in the role of the self-insert (and non-binary) “Mechanic” character, who can be either an Inkling or an Octoling according to your preference. You join the three members of “Deep Cut”, the band from Splatoon 3, as they search for treasure in the Spirhalite Islands. Actually, specifically, you crash-land in the Spirhalite Islands, improvise a hideout ship and then use that as a base to “raid” the various parts of the archipelago in search of a mythical “golden” treasure that supposedly lies somewhere in the fog-shrouded centre of the region.
What then unfolds is a series of missions that take several different forms. Completing the important missions removes the fog from the next area of the archipelago, allowing you to progress further, until you eventually reach the finale sequence. After the credits roll, there’s a fairly substantial endgame to tackle, allowing you full access to all of the game’s progression mechanics — including some options that you didn’t have during the “main” game.
In each mission, the Mechanic will take point, and will be accompanied by one of the three members of Deep Cut as a “bot buddy”, using a robot the group finds in the first stage of the game. This bot acts as a partner in combat — though they aren’t a lot of help until you can trigger their powerful “Showstopper” move — and can also be used as a means of jumping really high and mining crystals with its drill attachment. The shards you receive from said drilling operations form the main currency of the game.
The first kind of mission you’ll encounter is treasure hunting. These all unfold in a roughly similar way: they provide a linear path forwards through a level, with several crystals to mine along the way acting as checkpoints. Each level will present you with various obstacles to overcome, as well as encounters with the Spirhalite Islands’ native inhabitants, the Salmonids, most of whom gather in hordes around the aforementioned crystals. Progress through the stage and mine the bigger crystal at the end and you get a piece of treasure. There are also typically two hidden items in these stages: a scroll that reveals some of the background lore, and a compass that reveals a “Sampler Dungeon” secret level.
These levels are well-designed, offering a nice variety of environments over the game’s complete duration, as well as some increasingly interesting traversal challenges the further you go. There’s nothing quite on the same level as the earlier Splatoon games’ vastly underrated single-player campaigns in terms of complexity — though the ways in which the hidden items are concealed in some levels makes them immensely satisfying to track down.
The next kind of mission you’ll come across tasks you with mining a huge crystal. These stages take a more sandbox format, with an open structure allowing you to go off in any direction from the start. Your task in these stages is to gather enough Power Eggs, dropped by defeated Salmonids, to power up your drill enough to mine the aforementioned huge crystal. Once again, the Salmonids tend to congregate in hordes around smaller crystals dotted around the map, and some of these crystals trigger special effects on the Salmonids, making for more varied encounters. Again, there are hidden items in these stages — usually two, but sometimes three.
The third kind of mission is a Salmonid Den. These take the form of an arena in which your task is to accumulate a certain number of Power Eggs before a fairly tight time limit expires. The hordes of enemies just keep coming in these stages, so your aim is really just to defeat them as quickly as possible. In many ways, these stages can be looked upon as “DPS checks” of a sort; early in the game, you may find yourself needing to adjust your loadout in order to deal enough damage to succeed, but they become much easier the further you progress. There are no hidden items in these stages.
The fourth kind of mission is a Buried Ruins, which provides three possible treasures, one for each type of ink tank you can equip. These unfold similarly to Salmonid Dens, but instead of being a single encounter, they unfold across three floors, with the last introducing a new “Seasoned” version of a Salmonid that is much tougher than their regular counterparts, and often has additional attacks. To fully clear a Buried Ruins, you must win with all three different ink tanks, and each will provide you with a new “Relic” you can equip for a passive ability.
The fifth kind of mission is the aforementioned Sampler Dungeon, which is the closest to the prior Splatoon games’ “Hero Mode” single-player levels. In these often brilliantly designed stages, you are given a set loadout and challenged to reach the end of the stage using only that equipment. In effect, they act as an interactive, non-prescriptive tutorial on how to operate the various pieces of equipment, but also offer some tricky and fun challenges in their own right. There are no hidden items in these levels, and as technically “secret” levels, their rewards are likewise non-essential — though if you’re aiming for full completion of the game, you will, of course, want to clear them all.
Lastly, at several story milestones, there are boss battles. These are more elaborate encounters against a single huge Salmonid and typically involve a fight over multiple phases: avoiding the boss’ attacks and dealing direct damage to them; contending with a horde of smaller enemies to accumulate Power Eggs; using said Power Eggs to trigger a drill attack on the boss, which will stun it for a short period; and unleashing as much damage as possible on the boss while it is stunned.
The boss fights are… okay, but honestly not a patch on the bosses from past Splatoon games’ single-player modes, and that’s mostly down to the need to balance them for a player that can grow in power over the course of the game. To put it another way, they’re less “puzzly” and more like “RPG bosses”: big walls of HP for you to overcome while contending with specific mechanics at appropriate moments during the fight. That doesn’t make them bad as such — taken on their own terms in isolation, they’re decent, and different enough from one another to stand out — but those who have played through the prior Splatoon games’ single-player modes will notice a clear distinction.
As with regular Splatoon games, there’s a wide variety of weapon types to choose from, including rapid-firing ink guns of various descriptions, long-range “chargers”, melee weapons such as paint rollers and “Splatanas”, rocket launcher-equivalent “Blasters”, shotgun-style “Sloshers” and plenty more besides. While much of the focus is on splatting the Salmonids, Splatoon’s emphasis on territory control also applies here, because you can swim in your own ink, and while you do so you move and heal faster, recover the ink you use as ammunition, can get around in unusual ways such as swimming up walls, and, later in the game, can trigger useful abilities that are tied to your ink tank.
The three available ink tanks are themed around Speed, Power and Tactical play, and their main difference is which “gadgets” they allow you to use. These subweapons have a variety of different uses and aren’t just used for attacking. The Speed tank in particular has a number of gadgets that relate to mobility, allowing you to get around the battlefield while dealing damage and avoiding enemy attacks; conversely, the Power tank is designed for dealing heavy or ongoing damage in various ways, and the Tactical tank takes a fairly balanced approach, favouring the ability to play somewhat defensively.
Initially, you’ll only have access to one gadget per Tank, but as you progress you can unlock access to more, initially by expending loot and materials you acquire on your various raids, and subsequently by upgrading the hideout and then spending more loot and materials. To begin with, you can equip two gadgets, but after powering up your tank by collecting sufficient Power Eggs, you gain the ability to equip a third gadget and even have one of your three gadgets be from a different tank type — though you don’t have completely free choice in this regard.
Gadgets can then be customised with various parts, which you can find as loot in missions and also craft using materials. Gadgets take up a certain number of “slots” to equip, so you can’t simply bolt them all on at once; one of your options at each level up allows you the use of more slots on your gadgets, thereby increasing their overall effectiveness, but you’ll also find that rarer parts take up fewer slots while having stronger effects, too — and in the endgame you can upgrade parts in various ways to completely optimise your loadout.
There’s a pleasing variety of tactical options between the weapon types, gadgets and parts. Most players will likely find themselves sticking with a particular combination that they like — I certainly found the combination of Blaster, Tactical Tank, Splatellites, Shot Pot and Hi-Fiver to be near-invincible for most of the game — but there are occasions, such as the Sampler Dungeons and the Buried Ruins, where you’ll have to fiddle around a bit and find alternative solutions.
Weapons also have a level, so you’ll eventually “outgrow” them. Partway through the game, you get the ability to upgrade them by up to five levels, and in the endgame you’ll start coming across rare weapons that can be continually upgraded up to a maximum total level of 100. Weapons of a rarity higher than the most basic, common ones also come with passive abilities attached, and, again, in the endgame, you’re able to tinker with these and swap them around in order to build a fully optimised loadout.
The reason why I’m extremely grateful that Splatoon Raiders isn’t a roguelike is because it makes it much more straightforward to do all this tinkering with your build and loadout by removing the random element. If you’re beating your head against a particular challenge, you can rethink your overall build and try something new, then get a direct comparison because the encounters you’ll be facing are the same. With a roguelike, there’s always that unpredictable element that isn’t always completely fair — sure, that’s part of the fun in some games, but it wouldn’t have been a good fit for Splatoon Raiders.
If I’m perfectly honest, Splatoon Raiders did get a bit easy by the midpoint of the game, when I found my favoured build and just continually worked to optimise that — though I was playing on the middle difficulty rather than the hardest setting. It’s worth noting that most of the endgame challenges lock you to the hardest difficulty, though, so even if you breezed through the main game, the endgame challenges will put up a bit of a fight — which is exactly how it should be.
In terms of multiplayer, the options are fairly basic, but functional. You can start or join a co-op session with up to three other players, and make that session private by applying a short password to it. There’s also a “Call for Help” feature, which has two components: one, a player struggling to clear a particular stage can indicate that they need some assistance from other players (who will show up as anonymous, presumably to prevent trolling and harassment if things don’t quite go to plan) and two, you can make yourself available to help if someone asks for it, with a daily reward on offer the first time you do this. It is quite funny seeing the same levels always coming up when assisting others, but it’s overall a nice feature that allows people to engage with multiplayer in a casual way without having to get tangled up with the sweaties who take co-op games much too seriously.
In typical Nintendo tradition, you probably won’t encounter this problem much anyway, though, as outside of the Switch 2’s built-in GameChat function, there is no direct communication with other players within Splatoon Raiders itself other than the “Over here!” and “Booyah!” macros that have always been part of the series. Honestly, I know a lot of people have a problem with Nintendo’s approach to online play, but this is absolutely ideal for me; as someone who suffers considerable anxiety when faced with the prospect of communicating with strangers, but does actually still quite like the idea of playing with real people, it works great. And if I want to play with someone I know, then starting up GameChat at the OS level is as easy as always.
One thing I found myself continually thinking while playing Splatoon Raiders is how good Nintendo is at making video games that still feel like… video games. Splatoon Raiders does have a plot of sorts, yes, but it doesn’t have grand designs of being an epic movie; the story never gets in the way of the action and it never bogs things down; conversely, this does mean that it can, at times, feel like it’s a game without much to really “say”, but then not everything has to have a grand, literary message that Makes Us Think — that would be exhausting, frankly. The emphasis here is very much on enjoying the actual game side of things — and, fortunately, the game side of Splatoon Raiders is a lot of fun.
The presentation is great, too! Performance is rock solid, and there’s a particularly impressive draw distance in evidence; you can stand at the far end of a level and still see areas you previously inked off in the distance. It’s a little touch, but one that those with an appreciation for such things will like.
The sound is… odd. Rather than the offbeat but immensely catchy and tuneful music found in mainline Splatoon’s multiplayer matches, the soundtrack for most stages in Splatoon Raiders is best referred to as “cacophonous”. Some stages in particular I would describe as being like a particularly incompetent school orchestra attempting to play a Darius soundtrack while half of the brass section is still tuning up. There is method behind this madness, at least; it is, presumably, an attempt to reflect the chaos of the gameplay through the music — and a way of depicting the Salmonids as being distinctly alien. It is extremely effective in this regard, and does fit the action well; it might have been nice to have just a few slightly more tuneful tracks aside from the funky beats you hear on the hideout ship, though.
Okay, you could probably argue the gameplay overall gets a bit repetitive after a while — particularly the Salmonid Dens, which all kind of blend into one after a while, outside of a couple of notable exceptions that deliberately subvert the expectations prior stages have set in rather clever ways — but, as with anything, the question really worth asking is whether or not Splatoon Raiders achieves the thing it sets out to do. Is Splatoon Raiders, in fact, the thing it positions itself as being?
And in that regard, I have to say that yes, it does, and yes, it is. It’s a really enjoyable game that perhaps won’t go down in history as one of Nintendo’s all-time best games, but I’ve certainly had fun with it — and I will continue to do so as I work my way into that endgame. And when I’ve had my fill, I can set it aside, confident and satisfied that I’ve had my money’s worth, without feeling any obligation to play it into perpetuity. Honestly, these days, that last part might be one of the most valuable things about it.
That and it not being a roguelike. I’m really glad it’s not a roguelike. Because if it was, I honestly don’t think I’d have put as much time into it as I have. The clear structure and sense of tangible progression worked particularly well, and kept me coming back for more day after day, session after session — and has me thinking about going back to play some more, even as I type this. That, for me, is the sign of a good game.
I hope we see more Splatoon games like this. The multiplayer-centric mainline series absolutely has its place — and, although I don’t play it much, it is one of the few competitive multiplayer titles I do genuinely enjoy when I engage with it — but it’d be fun to have more opportunities to have different types of fun with these characters in this world. There’s a lot of scope for things that could be done — but honestly, I’d just be happy to see a Splatoon Raiders 2 in a couple of years’ time.
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
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