Blair Loveday
The Switch has had an insane number of hits, from the many excellent sequels to long series, to the new IP that has popped up like Splatoon.
The question is, after 2 successful releases, can the squids over at Nintendo keep the success rolling?
If somehow you haven’t heard of this series, Splatoon is a fundamentally online experience. You get dropped into a map and you use paintball guns and other paint weapons to cover as much of the ground as possible in paint before the timer runs out. You can knock out opposition players by attacking them, splatter paint over their paint, and all kinds of other chaos to get the win.
You can switch from being a human like character into a Squid by holding a button. Being a squid lets you travel faster through your coloured paint which also charges your paint gauge, so getting the hang of when to squid and when to pop out and fire at your enemies is key. It is absolutely insane, and thanks to incredibly well crafted gameplay, fun as hell.
With Splatoon 2 they introduced a single player story mode. This amounted to a weak story to justify single player missions. That was fine because the game was so much fun that just having a series of levels to beat offline was all I wanted. Well the third game in the series is…. about the same.
You follow a guy down a grate to discover that some furry goo is everywhere. You complete missions to remove the goo, and then all kinds of weird things happen. There is a lawnmower, you go into space, there is some issue with treasure. The text can be small when playing in handheld mode, and with no voice acting a zoned out of the story pretty fast. Having said that, I did not care, it again gave me a series of single player missions to play and I was a happy man.
The real meat of the game is the online stuff. If you have played Splatoon 2 before, then you won’t notice too many differences. The biggest is that instead of having spawn spots you appear in a cannon in the air and can fire yourself down to where you need. This is incredibly limited by getting rid of those dang spawn campers.
There are new maps to enjoy, new training arenas, and heaps of new customisations for your squid-person-thing. But what you really want to know about is the new weaponry. How else are you going to … paint… your enemies? Well there is a paint-sword thing, but the tri Stringer was my jam. This fires off 3 blasts that explode ink, which was an ass to use but fun as hell.
If you have played Splatoon before you know what you are in for.
Some tweaks and additions make it a better version of the previous entries in the series. If you haven’t, don’t let that 3 intimidate you. I suck at Splatoon and even when I am getting my ass kicked I have a great time playing it. Splatoon 3 takes a winning formula, and just makes more with it.
Released: September 2022
Rating: G
Platforms reviewed: Nintendo Switch
Genre: Action
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo