The pitch, in plain English
Splatoon Raiders is a $49.99 Nintendo Switch 2 game built on the skeleton of a series that has spent a decade selling stylish 4v4 paint-shooting chaos. The hook is simple: take the inking, the squid-swimming, the gadget meta, and the manic energy of Salmon Run, then drop the entire competitive Turf War side of the franchise. What is left is a single-player and co-op looter-shooter where turquoise replaces the brown of Destiny and the gunmetal of Borderlands.
The pitch is more coherent than it sounds. Splatoon's younger developers have always been the most trend-aware team inside Nintendo, and a looter-shooter for Switch 2 is exactly the kind of genre experiment that the franchise was built to absorb.
Combat and loadouts
Anyone who has played a Splatoon game will feel at home in the first ten minutes. You swap between kid and squid form on the fly, paint everything in sight, and use ink as both a weapon and a traversal tool. On Switch 2 hardware, the famously colorful mess looks sharper than it has on any prior Nintendo console, and the frame rate holds even when three friends are filling a room with the stuff.
The new layer is the loot grind. Weapons span the full Splatoon arsenal, from simple blasters to paint rollers and ink-shooting sniper rifles. Each one is augmented with gadgets in three flavors: power, speed, and tactical. You can equip two gadgets at once, but they have to come from the same category, which forces meaningful tradeoffs. A speed plus tactical build, for instance, lets you reposition and drop traps but gives up raw damage. Each loadout also includes a helper robot that collects resources and doubles as a bouncy platform, which turns out to be a quiet MVP in the heat of a raid.
The upgrade system is where Splatoon Raiders pulls ahead of most looter-shooters. Weapons and gadgets take slots for mods that change behavior in visible ways, like swapping a vertical slash for a horizontal one. Permanent stat boosts exist but are secondary. The result is that you feel your build changing, not just your numbers ticking up.
Structure and variety
Levels live on the Spirhalite Islands, and they come in three flavors. Wide multiplayer maps with multiple paths. Tight, single-weapon showcases that test a specific tool. And timed gauntlets that throw a swarm of fish enemies at you under a clock. Boss fights carry the story forward, and the story does enough to keep the run from feeling like a treadmill.
Solo play is fully supported, but co-op is where the game relaxes into something rare for Nintendo: an actual designed-for-it live-service loop. Calling in strangers for a run is fast, and the chaos of four players using different weapons on the same island makes the standard 4v4 Turf War feel almost quiet in retrospect.
Who it is for
Splatoon Raiders will not win over anyone who has bounced off Destiny, Division, or Warframe. The loop is still the loop, and the gunplay is still a dressed-up paintball match. What it does do is take a format that has aged into tedium on PC and consoles and give it a genuinely new coat.
For Splatoon fans, this is the most interesting thing the series has done since the Wii U original. For everyone else, it is a polite, well-tuned argument that the looter-shooter is not dead, just in need of a better wardrobe.