Deep Cut wash up on a ring of forgotten islands, and Splatoon finally has a single-player adventure worth staying home for.
A different kind of ink war
For years I have treated Splatoon as a twenty-minute game. Load in for a few Turf War matches, then set the console back down. Raiders is the first entry that kept me on the couch for a whole evening with nobody else in the room. There is no ranked ladder, no three-minute clock ticking down a match. There is a battered ship, a crew of loudmouth musicians, and a chain of islands that very much wants me gone. I did not expect a Switch 2 spin-off to be the thing that finally made me care about the story Nintendo tells in this universe.
What Splatoon Raiders is about
A storm drags Deep Cut out of the sky. Shiver, Frye and Big Man crash-land their helicopter on the Spirhalite Islands, a strange archipelago nobody seems to remember, and I turn up as the Mechanic who keeps the whole operation running. After a month of salvaging enough scrap to float a hideout ship, we start raiding the islands for the treasure Deep Cut swears is buried at their centre, and for a way back home.
This is a single-player action-RPG built on a raid loop, with co-op bolted on for up to four players. If you came expecting Turf War, it is gone. In its place sits a progression campaign that behaves far more like a looter-shooter than anything the series has tried before, and it is exclusive to Switch 2 for reasons the hardware makes obvious within minutes.
Gameplay
Each raid drops me onto one of the Spirhalite Islands with a loadout of ink weapons and mechanical Gadgets, and one member of Deep Cut riding shotgun inside the Exploration Bot. That companion matters. The Bot lays down covering fire while I reposition, and it sniffs out the hidden caches I would otherwise walk straight past. The islands come at me in three flavours of Salmonid: Lesser ones that swarm in the dozens, Boss ones with a weak point I have to read and exploit, and Seasoned ones that punish any lazy positioning I bring into a fight.
The hook is persistence. Gear I earn on one raid comes back with me, the hideout ship keeps sprouting new upgrades between runs, and every trip lets me push a little deeper into the archipelago. The moment-to-moment shooting carries the same slick ink physics the series is known for, and the traversal, swimming through my own ink and launching up walls, is the best it has ever felt.
I will be honest about where it slips. The campaign leans on its raid structure hard enough that a couple of its cleverest ideas, the Gadgets especially, never get the room they deserve. There is a stretch in the middle where the game asks me to grind a few levels before the next island opens up, and the recommended-level gating can shove me into an area I am plainly too weak for. When Raiders trusts its own systems it is superb. When it pads them, I felt it.
Story
The surprise is how much I liked hanging around the ship. Splatoon has always kept its idols at arm’s length, cool posters on a wall. Living with Deep Cut for eighteen hours turns them into a bickering, ridiculous surrogate family, and the downtime between raids, where I chip away at who they are and how their history ties into these islands, gives the cut-scenes real warmth. Big Man alone earns the price of admission. The plot itself is a straightforward hunt for one big score, but the company kept me smiling.
Graphics and performance on Switch 2
This is the game Nintendo built to show what Switch 2 can do, and it shows. Raiders holds a rock-solid 60 frames per second even when an island is drowning in Salmonids and ink is spraying across every surface. Handheld or docked, it is one of the best-looking things on the console right now, with lighting and water the older hardware simply could not have pushed. It works as a stress-test for whatever the mainline series does next, and after playing it I would bet Splatoon 4 is going to look extraordinary.
Soundtrack and sound design
Deep Cut were the musical heart of Splatoon 3, so I expected the soundtrack to be wall-to-wall earworms. It is not quite that. The tracks here lean atmospheric, scoring a tense sweep across a hostile island rather than lodging in your skull for a week. It suits the mood of the raids, and the squelch and splatter of the ink still sounds fantastic through a good pair of headphones, but I finished the game humming less than I do after a night of Splatfest sets.
Player experience
The main campaign runs about eighteen hours, and chasing everything the islands hide pushes well past forty. At forty-nine dollars digital, fifty-nine on a cartridge, that is a lot of game for the money. Co-op for up to four, local or online, turns the tougher raids into a party worth hosting, and it smooths over the difficulty spikes that sting when you are alone. That level-gating wobble in the middle is the one thing I would warn a solo player about. Ride it out, or bring a friend, and the back half of the islands is where Raiders becomes hard to put down.
Verdict
Splatoon Raiders is the boldest thing the series has attempted, and most of the risk pays off. It swaps competitive multiplayer for a solo campaign that actually lands, wraps it in the best-feeling movement and the sharpest visuals on Switch 2, and finally gives Deep Cut room to become characters I cared about. A grindy mid-game stretch and a soundtrack that whispers where I wanted it to shout keep it short of perfect. As a first swing at this kind of game it is a superb one, and it has me more excited for where Splatoon goes next than I have been in years.
