Thoughts on Splatoon Raiders

Splatoon Raiders might be one of the tightest designed video games I’ve played this year. Everything in this game compliments each other. Your movement options, the enemies’ attack patterns and the level design feed into each other brilliantly. The game naturally teaches you how to read it and how to deal with enemy constellations it throws at you. It becomes second nature to chart out your battle plan according to the enemies that spawn. For example, one bit of smart design is that the more long ranged or buffing enemies are better visible from farther away.

Something that was already in the mainline Splatoon titles but I really came to appreciate here is how damage gets displayed. Instead of health bars, the more damage an enemy gets the more of your ink they have on them. This acts as a perfect indicator and informs the decision of who to target next, which in hectic situations has to be made in split-seconds.

The game also raises the bar gently but steadily so that by the end the arenas can be stuffed full with enemies, the screen being only a mesh of chaos and it’s still decipherable and fun to make quick decisions.

I just finished the game solo on the hardest “survivalist” difficulty and had so many moments where I either barely lost after having a pretty good run or I snatched the victory by a hair length. I played the first hours on the normal difficulty, but after trying the harder one I didn’t want to go back. Not because normal was boring. The game still was very fun. These moments I described earlier occur way more often thanks to the smaller margin of error.

I don’t want this to become an all/encompassing review, but shout out to the weapons and the player progression. It was so fun to experiment with builds and figure out which gadgets had good synergy with each other. The only thing I can think of that bugged me at times was the lack of the typical Splatoon-style soundtracks. The more atmospheric songs kind of went into the background after a while which probably was their purpose.