Review | Review: Splatoon 2 is easily the slickest game of the past year
Squid Kids competing and cooperating to cover levels in their team’s colour? This novel twist on the shooter genre is a hit despite its shortcomings
Splatoon 2
Nintendo
3.5 stars
Splatoon 2 gets so much right that it’s easy to ignore the occasionally baffling ways in which Nintendo has failed to score into an open goal (not least the chance to call the game Spla2n).
A sequel to 2015’s third-person, multiplayer-focused, Wii U-exclusive shooter, Splatoon 2 for the new Nintendo Switch will be a wholly new experience for many: the console is already attracting converts who never picked up Nintendo’s previous machine, while the two biggest reasons to own a Switch to date – Mario Kart 8 and Breath of the Wild – are both already out on the Wii U.
For those new to the whole Splatoon concept, here’s a potted history: you are a Squid Kid. That is, both Kid (most of the time) and Squid (whenever you bit a button and morph into a cephalopod). You are armed with ink-spraying weapons, and your job is to cover as much of a multilevel arena as possible with your team’s colour.
That’s partially because when you’re standing in your own ink, you can move faster, recharge your weapons and camouflage yourself entirely; but it’s also because at the end of the tight three-minute rounds, the winning team is the one that has managed to cover the most of the arena with their paint.
It’s a novel twist on the multiplayer shooter, but one which immediately provides Splatoon 2 with a reason to exist in a crammed market. The game is as much about your physical relationship with the levels in which you fight as it is landing shots on the enemy, and in fact, a significant portion of the weapons, from a gigantic paint roller to a literal bucket, are much more useful for dousing large amounts of the map in ink than they are for taking out opponents.
