Splatoon 2 review: return of Nintendo's ink-spraying Squid Kids is a blast
Splatoon 2 gets so much right that it’s easy to ignore the occasional baffling ways in
which Nintendo has failed to score into an open goal. Not least missing the chance to call the game
“Spla2n”.
A sequel to 2015’s third-person multiplayer-focused Wii U-exclusive shooter, Splatoon 2 will be a wholly new experience for many: the Switch 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 hold ZL you literally turn into a cephalopod). You are armed with ink-spraying weapons, and your job is to cover as much of a multi-level arena as possible with you 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.
That key mode, Turf War, is back front-and-centre in Splatoon 2. But the game itself is significantly larger. A sizeable single-player adventure reconfigures the action to focus on platforming over gunplay, with the squid-and-ink combination providing players with a number of fun ways to navigate tight levels culminating in a series of boss fights. You won’t be surprised when the first of many falls after exactly three hits, but that sort of reliance on cliche helps develop instant familiarity for what is only ever going to be a side-mode to the main game.
Meatier is Salmon Run, the most significant introduction to Splatoon 2. A four-player co-op mode which sees a team of players battle an unending horde of salmon to gather golden eggs – yes, the whole game is themed like this – it’s a welcome change in pace from the competitive modes, and one where your win-rate will hopefully edge slightly higher than 50%.
But about those missed opportunities. When it comes to the internet, Nintendo’s always been keen to zig when everyone else zags. Even if zagging is popular, desirable, and the only logical option, Nintendo will insist on zigging, just because.
Some of those choices pay off here, in a weird way. For no real reason, as far as I can tell, Splatoon 2 follows the first game in offering up an extremely limited selection of maps at any one time: for a two hour period, two levels will be in play, before they’re swapped out for the next period, and so on. On the downside, that means that you get an obviously limited amount of variety each play session. But the positive aspect of it is in the early days of the game, you manage to avoid the flailing feeling of being repeatedly dumped in unfamiliar arenas and pounded by unforgiving opponents. Instead, after 60 minutes of play, you’ll have had at least 10 matches on one specific arena, putting you a good way towards competent.
Others don’t work quite as well. Salmon Run is one of the best multiplayer experiences, not just in Splatoon 2, but on the Switch as a whole. Yet outside of unspecified periods when the mode becomes available online, it’s only playable as a local multiplayer mode, requiring as many Switches and copies of Splatoon 2 as there are players. Oh yeah, that’s right: there’s no splitscreen multiplayer in Splatoon 2, for that mode or any other.
If you decide to play online with friends, you’ll be meeting another world of odd choices. Much ink has been spilled (sorry) over Splatoon 2’s way of handling voice chat, and it is exactly as bad as it sounds. In short, a paired phone app serves as your connection to your friends, requiring a maze of wires to hear the game and teammates at the same time. Oh, and if you do decide to play the full online game with your friends, though, you should try and find three of them: if you want to chat to them, rather than be simply playing the same game at the same time, you have to be a full team of four.
Then there’s the fact that you can’t change your weapons during a match – or between matches. You have to quit out of the multiplayer mode altogether to make those changes. Doubly annoying, since you also can’t see what weapons your teammates have picked. If you end up with four rollers on one team, you’re going to lose. Better luck next time!
The weird thing about these choices, though, is that they’re all, as far as I can tell, deliberate. This isn’t a game with a lack of polish – in fact, it’s probably the slickest experience I’ve had with a new game since Overwatch came out over a year ago. The resolute desire to ignore conventional wisdom has given us a game with unusable voice comms and the best experiences locked away for days on end, but it’s also given us a series where cool Squid Kids load up water pistols with ink and spray shipping containers DayGlo pink. That feels like a fair trade-off.
