Splatoon Raiders Hands-On Preview – Fresh Yet Familiar

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I’ve not been the biggest Splatoon player, but I’ve at least dabbled in all of them, with most of my time spent in Salmon Run and I feel like Splatoon Raiders will feel good for anyone that was a fan of Salmon Run, the singe-player missions in Splatoon 3 or just the game in general, but this is a single-player first game in the best way possible.

The general premise for Splatoon Raiders is dropping in on levels to collect treasure before chaos ensures with the Salmonids which you must take out before you can collect it. It feels extremely familiar, but there’s a depth to your load out that goes far beyond anything that we’ve seen in a Splatoon game.

The core weapon experience feels quite familiar with rollers, brushes, and a number of blasters all offering very different experiences, but there’s now three tank types including Power, Speed and Tactical, each with come with two equippable gadgets that range from a multiplied shot, to a turret to a quick boost and that makes the game feel totally fresh with the ability to change between levels and totally alter your play style.

These gadgets can be altered even further by tinkering and adding parts that might increase damage or the area that the gadget effects, and this is really up to you in how far you take this with you able to mix and match parts, or just fill all open slots with what you have available. There’s also upgrades to your tanks that can effect your HP, weapon damage and the amount of slots that you can attach to your gadget upgrades as well.

There’s also relics that can be attached both generally and to each tank that might add an extra jump mid-air or the ability to attract eggs from a further distance, and there’s also Bot Buddy power-ups as well which basically take over the whole screen and are great to take out multiple enemies.

For players of other Splatoon games, everything will feel incredibly familiar including how your weapons feel, having to refill by going below ground, and just generally the core gameplay loop remains unchanged in the best possible way, with just these abilities and upgrades adding depth to the entire experience that feels need after several mainline iterations.

I really think Nintendo has done a great job in adding depth to the weapons, gadgets and other various upgrades, but then you can also just jump in and play without tinkering too much and I’m fairly sure that you’d make it a good way through the ground, and in typical Nintendo fashion it does a pretty good job at teaching you everything as you unlock them.

Whilst this is primarily a single player experience, you can play the game co-op as well, with the game scaling and that’s a familiar level of chaos that you will remember from other Splatoon games, and whilst this is primarily a single-player game without any PVP, I’m glad that there’s at least the option to play with friends.

There’s also a bunch of customisations that you can make to your hub between levels as well, and I didn’t get a bunch of time to play around with this, but again, it just spoke to a level of depth that I haven’t seen in a Splatoon game to date, so I’m very keen to see how that plays out.

All-in-all, there’s a lot of reasons to be excited for Splatoon Raiders whether you’re a newcomer to the franchise or a series veteran due to its depth in combat and just how good it looks on the Switch 2 in general.