I honestly have not played a whole lot of Splatoon until this game. I played various versions at PAX, I played a couple of the server stress tests, and just didn’t vibe with the core game mode. I like PVP, I like that they did something weird with it beyond just doing an arena shooter, but I don’t go to Nintendo for PVP games. Raiders looked neat when it was first shown off, but then closer to release after reading more it finally clicked for me that it’s a looter-shooter. Nintendo made a looter-shooter, and conveniently it came at a time where I have a looter-shooter shaped hole in my heart.

So yeah, Raiders is a looter-shooter. They took the Salmon Run mode and spun it off into its own (primarily) single-player game. The core gameplay is straight Splatoon, you’re a squid-kid, you spread ink with a variety of wacky improvised weaponry made from trash, you dive in to your ink to reload and move faster. In this strictly PVE mode, you’re hunting Salmonids, collecting power eggs, mining Spirhalite and getting loot. Loot makes you stronger, power eggs help you unlock more gear, spirhalite shards are basically “money”, all that helps you shoot more powerful Salmonids.

The game has a five main types of missions:

  • Treasure Hunt - Linear missions on the surface, you go point to point with your companion in the Drill-bot, kill a bunch of Salmonids, leave with a relic.

  • Shard Mining - Non-linear missions on the surface, you’re still going point to point but the goal is to hit little encampments around the map in whatever order you want, and once you hit an egg threshold you can come back and drill a giant spirhalite crystal. More eggs, more rewards.

  • Gem Hunt - A single-floor underground arena dungeon that’s focused on a single type of salmonid, so they often require you to come up with a specific load-out that works well against that kind of target.

  • Buried Ruins - These are arena fights sorta like Gem Hunts, but you have to do three in a row, ending in a fight against a gigantic “seasoned” boss salmonid. These also expect you to beat them with each of the three different “tanks”, which are your different gadget sets.

  • Sampler Dungeons - These are little puzzle missions – often with no salmonids at all – that are there to teach you how all the gadgets work, how they complement other gadgets, and some novel applications. Some of my favorite content in the game.

These missions are strewn across a decently sized world map, they unlock a couple at a time so you’re rarely (if ever) forced to play a given level at a specific time, and it’s somehow a pretty perfect balance between exploration, hectic cramped dungeons, crazy boss-fights and slower missions where you get to think for awhile. Nothing overstays its welcome, because nearly everything has a hard time cap.

The rewards are very plentiful and varied. There’s 13 weapon archetypes, with a ton of sub-varieties per archetype that specialize in ink utilization, fire rate, range, etc. Then there’s rarity tiers, with only the 5-star ones able to be endlessly upgraded. Then there’s “primo” which is just an extra flag that even further spikes the specific skill it specializes in. So weapons alone have a ton of variety, not all of them are super viable as you get deeper into the game, but it’s all pretty good, use whatever you want.

Then there’s gadgets and perks, your gadget tank can hold 2 (eventually 3) gadgets which act as your sidearms or utility items (grenades, jump-jets, turrets, splatellites, etc). You eventually unlock 15 total gadgets across 3 tanks, and as you start playing with and using them you’ll start getting gadget parts as loot, which are an INCREDIBLY deep system of customizing what your gadgets can do. Each gadget has a ludicrous selection of perks to choose between, basic stuff like “your giant bomb does more damage” and “the explosion radius is larger”, but then also stuff like “your splatellites have a wider radius and drop ink now” or “your splatchet only attacks vertically now, but it does more damage” or “you now have a chance to apply a debuff with this gadget”.

These parts can be crafted or found as random drops, and they too have 1-5 star rarities. Higher rarity typically means “does more damage” or “does similar damage but costs less to equip”. Once you’ve farmed up a bunch of these, you can choose how you want to fill the slots available on each gadget, and your specific loadout will dramatically change how the gadget works, how long it’s active, how much damage it does, what extra effects it has, etc. Throughout most of the game, favorite load-out had Splatellites with near 100% uptime that do crazy damage at all times like my squidkid is casting Spirit Guardians as a cantrip. They also have the ability to pick up eggs just by rolling near them. Then I had two panic-button skills: Splatchet to do absurd straight-line damage, and Blast Boot to bounce out of (or into) a target-rich environment.

Those two core systems alone provide a serious and very deep level of itemization options for how you want to play, but then there’s also relic powers and weapon powers. The main “treasure” items you’re digging up from this island chain are Salmonid Relics, and each confers a different relic power, that’s basically your set of passives: stuff like “you can do a double-jump” or “you move faster” or “you recover gadgets faster while submerged” or “enemies take more damage after you hit them 3 times”. Some of these are tied to your specific tank type, others are generic, and they can all be mixed and matched to your liking. Eventually you also start getting weapons with these same perks on them, and even later on you get the ability to customize which you want on your weapon and which you want as your “base” set, and if you double-up they stack properly!

As I worked through more and more of the game I realized it was time to see what the professional brain-problem-havers are using to push deep deep deep into the post-game, and as usual it’s like they’re playing a completely different game. My end-game loadout dropped my beloved Splatellites for the Torqscrew: a gigantic fan that debuffs everything in the zone, deals damage in a crazy huge radius, and also automatically picks up eggs in that crazy radius. On the damage side, nothing beats the freeze/shatter loop. The two jump gadgets – Blast Boot and Jump Bomb – both have perks that have a 100% freeze chance to everything in a decent radius. Then over on your weapon you can add the Ice Breaker perk, that lets you do 5x damage to anything that’s frozen.

  • Step 1: Blast Boot to jump into a clump of dudes, who will all freeze immediately
  • Step 2: Throw down a Torqscrew to start debuffing everything and get ready to collect all the eggs that are about to end up everywhere
  • Step 3: Shoot anything that’s frozen, I was using a rocket launcher, so I’d hit everything in a decent radius and it would all explode and almost all die in one shot.
  • Step 4: Jump Bomb to get back in the air, and hover around on the Torqscrew, getting a damage buff for being in the air, shooting whatever didn’t immediately explode.
  • Repeat until everything is dead

This load-out has carried through the end of the post-game, and then pretty far beyond that into the post-post-game. The post-post-game is an endless randomized dungeon crawl, where you’re going into an endless randomized set of 3-floor dungeons and pushing further and further into endlessly scaling difficulty dungeons. Even this far into the post-post-game I’m still finding new weapon types, I’m still finding new gadget parts, still finding new treasure upgrades, and I’m still chasing after a Primo 5-star long-range blaster variant, or a Primo 5-star explosive slosher.

And this is all just the single-player portion. Until you get into the endgame anything can be played with friends or with match-making. Lobbies are 3 players, and they’ve got to be backfilling with bots because I have never waited more than 20-30 seconds to get a crew ready. There’s no PVP mode, it’s fully PVE, and it’s a very breezy PVE. The approach to multiplayer difficulty is seamless scaling, so regardless of level / gear / loadout, all the enemies are scaled so everybody does the same proportional damage. It works really well, no notes.

This game is perfect. It is pure looter-shooter. No fluff. No filler. Play it however you want. Until the ultra turbo post end game basically everything is viable. It’s amazing. I love it. It’s not going to get me to buy Splatoon 3, but if a future Splatoon game is this PVE + Classic PVP, I am down. Highly recommended. I’ve played a lot of amazing games so far this year, and this is easily way way up there near the top.