Blair Loveday
I absolutely loved playing the original Splatoon release.
The fun gameplay made an average campaign an absolute blast to play. Well now with the Side Order DLC tfor the latest Splatoon 3 here is more reasons to play this game, or replay this game with a brand new mode.
There is a story here, but honestly my eyes glazed over pretty fast.
In short you job is to get to the top of the building. You do this by completing challenges on each of the floors. This can be anything from killing portals that enemies are coming out of, keeping a certain area covered in your paint, to getting a soccer ball where it needs to go.
Complete the 30 levels and you are done.
Don’t panic if you get killed, it turns out this DLC package is a rogue lite.
Over time you upgrade your kit, and then make your way to the top level to fight that boss. The biggest issue the game has is the levels get repetitive fast. The good news is the gameplay still rules, so the repetitive levels are at least fun. There are some quirks with other aspects of the level, my favourite is the floor being a trampoline resulting in a lot of chaotic bouncing and paint shooting.
There is a series of new enemies, which are a bunch of fish that do different things like leaving a black ink trail, to shooting at ya, to just mindlessly spraying black ink all over the place. It’s very silly, but very fun.
It’s not the hardest rogue lite around, and only took me a few goes to get to the end the first time.
The good news is that once that is done you can replay the tower with different weapons which makes the challenge wildly different. On top of this you have elements like upgrading your gear which adds some variety. You will also need this kit if you are going to play the more challenging versions of levels as they can get hard.
While Splatoon 3: Side Order isn’t the hardest game out there, it absolutely is fun. It’s a nice shift from the previous versions of the game that makes singe player slightly different, and gives you a good excuse to get back int the game and enjoy the sweet sweet gameplay.
I really hope the next iteration of Splatoon comes with this mode baked in.
Released: March 2024
Rating: G
Platforms reviewed: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Action
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo