Splatoon Review

Cuter than Cuttlefish:

Despite Nintendo proving themselves full of surprises for over thirty years, I was still surprised by Splatoon. I’d seen the pre-release coverage, the Nintendo Directs and the extended play sessions streamed online, but I still wasn’t expecting to fall in love with Nintendo’s brand new, online-centric, multiplayer focused shooter – yes, you read all of that correctly – as much as I have done.

Storyline:

Splatoon is about a bunch of anthropomorphised squids – known as Inklings – duking it out with each other to gain dominance over turf. It’s pretty much as simple as that, and as an online multiplayer shooter I didn’t really need any more motivation that that to start flinging ink at my enemies.

There is a single player mode here, where the Squidlings face off against comical octopus tentacles and, whilst there’s a little more to get stuck into here, narrative still isn’t a driving force. Instead, players are sent off to battle in this cephalopodic war by a shady, sewer dwelling nutjob. It’s loose but funny stuff, and the single player has plenty of charming moments (especially the constantly surprised and terrified octopi we’re tasked with mercilessly taking out)

Gameplay:

But the ink-filled heart of Splatoon is in its online multiplayer offerings. Shooter fatigue set in for me a long time ago, shortly after the first Modern Warfare and its wonderful online component became the subject of tireless iteration and endless plagiarism. It was truly wonderful, then, to come to Splatoon and see none of Call of Duty’s recognizable legacy.

Splatoon is a different beast from most games you’ll have played before. I’ve had a long history with the genre, but Splatoon is the first team-based shooter I’ve played that is very disinterested in having you actually shoot your opponents. Indeed, a team can focus on nothing but taking out their opposition, be sitting on fifty kills and no deaths by the match’s end, and still lose the game. Splatoon is all about territory control –like a game of king of the hill where the entire arena is the hill at all times.

To control territory, Squidlings cover the ground in ink from various weapons – such as ink filled water pistols and paint rollers. As each round starts, you and your teammates will immediately start shooting the floor around you and spreading further into the no-man’s-land between the two team’s spawn points. Inevitably your teams clash, and the struggle for supremacy is on.  At the end of the short-lived three minute timer, the team whose colours cover the most ground win. Whilst you can kill an enemy by painting them with ink, I only dispatched my enemies when they were trying to paint the same ground I was, or undoing my work behind me. Killing and being killed never proved the focus of my games. Instead, a careful and co-ordinated push forwards from your team – ensuring you’re always covering the most ground and defending large areas of perfectly painted patio from your enemies – saw victory more often than a game with a high body count.

One of Splatoon’s many neat tricks (and another aspect that sets it apart from the competition) is the fact that you can turn into a squid at any time, traversing the ink that covers the ground to get around quicker, climb vertical walls surprise your enemies (squid form essentially works as a stealth mode, perfect to pop up from and unload into an unsuspecting foe). Shooting a swath of ink towards your destination then surfing through it as a squid feels aptly fluid and really great, but getting caught in an enemy’s colour (or trapped by a smart opponent) quickly makes you feel infuriatingly helpless.

It’s this balance to Splatoon that helps it become an easy title to love. Even when your team lose, the three minute limit (and a dose of consolatory experience points) helps you feel like it wasn’t a waste of time. I was always having fun in Splatoon, and that’s really important. The matches have a penchant for turnarounds and comebacks I’ve only ever seen in other Nintendo properties such as Mario Kart, and whilst this makes for a couple of really annoying losses, it also means you never feel like the match is a hopeless one until the final buzzer.