Splatoon Raiders (NS2)

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Switch 2 has been full of surprises. In just 15 months, it has hosted the first 3D Donkey Kong game in 26 years, an open-world Mario Kart, a sequel to Kirby Air Ride, and a Minecraft-esque Pokémon offshoot that's currently contending for GotY status. Yet, nothing is quite as surprising as Splatoon Raiders, a single-player spin-off from the mainline competitive shooter series. I think many of us expected the game to be one of those humble, workmanlike titles that fill in the gaps between big releases. As it turns out, it's much more than that.

Splatoon Raiders starts with a bang, in a sequence that wouldn't feel out of place in a Resident Evil game. An unnamed, masked pilot ferries a group of travelers in a gray helicopter to the middle of the ocean, where a giant cloud spiral has formed. Just as an odd glow starts to emanate from the center of the formation, the helicopter fails and goes down. One month passes. The survivors, who happen to be Deep Cut (a trio of adventurous musicians named Shiver, Frye, and Big Man first introduced in Splatoon 3) and the now unmasked pilot, have constructed a makeshift barge, which allows them to survive among the mysterious Spirhalite Islands. Instead of heading back to the safety of Splatsville, Deep Cut decides to leverage the pilot's exceptional mechanical skills to push deeper into the island chain, in an attempt to unearth lost treasure and, if all goes right, identify the source of that mysterious glow.

While this treasure hunt is a perfect setup for the single-player campaign to come, it's not particularly gripping from a narrative perspective. The story adds a few interesting wrinkles to the Splatoon universe — for example, the party plans to use the acquired gold to get Splatsville out of debt — and reveals more of the personalities and family histories of Shiver, Fry, and Big Man, but it's not an essential part of the game. It's really more of a way to push the unnamed hero into the fray.

It's within that fray that the greatness of Splatoon Raiders reveals itself. As the pilot-turned-mechanic, you will make raids onto individual islands, defeating any angry Salmonids that stand between you and treasure. You'll spray destructive ink at enemies to take them down, and spread that same ink along the ground and up walls to allow easy traversal. Anyone familiar with the Splatoon series will feel completely at home with the moment-to-moment gameplay: cover the area with ink to slow down rivals and speed up your own movement, transform from a kid into a squid to soak up that ink and refill your weapon, and then emerge from the ink to lay waste to the opposition. It's all amazingly fluid and nimble, enhanced greatly by the precision of gyro controls.

Controls are only one piece of the puzzle, though. The other, more important piece is the structure of each raid: level design, enemy placement, etc. Fortunately, the development team at Nintendo EPD nailed that component as well. Things start off simply with linear island chains and a few enemy choke points, but swiftly become far more busy and complex. In one stage, you'll scale a tall mountain; in another you'll leap between moving ice floes; in yet another you'll grind along rails in the style of Ratchet & Clank. The enemy playgrounds also become more involved. Toward the end of the main campaign, thanks to conveyor belts and launch pads, I started getting flashbacks to leaping and swinging through monster-infested arenas in Doom Eternal.

The legion of Salmonid forces keeps pace with this rising level of complexity. You'll encounter cannon fodder enemies at first, but soon enough you'll face off with wildly creative and demented foes, including those that attack from the air, from beneath the earth, and from afar with deadly accuracy. One particularly nasty enemy is the Steel Eel, a 30-foot long mechanical eel with a cowcatcher head and a row of ink-dripping cans along its underside. The only way to bring it down is to defeat the pilot on its tail.

Despite the steady evolution of enemy and stage design, the game can't completely escape a feeling of repetition, especially if you play for an extended period of time in one sitting. There are only a handful of mission types, which can only be reformatted in so many ways. Also, no matter your skill level, you will need to grind at times to hit the next character level, so you can clear the most punishing fights.

The good news is that, even if you fail, you won't return empty-handed. No matter how far you make it, you'll earn experience points, Spirhalite shards, weapons, relics, and skill points. Then it's back to your barge to use those resources to perfect your build. This is Splatoon Raiders at its most addictive. You'll infiltrate an island, return with new loot, replace your old weapons and gear with new varieties, and then repeat the process. When this loop gets going, it's almost impossible to put the game down.

It helps that the developers created a framework that rewards experimentation and allows for seemingly endless customization. Not only can you equip one of 100 weapon variations, but you can play around with three different tanks: Speed, Power, and Tactical. The Speed Tank allows builds based on quick movement and evasion; the Power tank is all about brute force; and the Tactical Tank (my favorite) is designed around managing space on the battlefield. You can arm it with the Shot Pot gadget, which functions as a deployable turret.

Each tank comes with several different gadgets, each of which can be enhanced with gadget parts, which provide some kind of attribute boost. You can add explosive ammunition to the Shot Pot or introduce a freezing effect to the Splatchet. As you expand your ship, you can even craft new parts from scratch. Not only that, but you can also enhance your weapons by several levels and equip many different Salmonid relics, which provide passive perks. By combining all these elements — weapons, tanks, gadgets, and relics — you can make a wholly unique, astonishingly destructive build. Freed from the need to maintain balance in a PvP setting, the team at EPD has gone wild.

While EPD has walked away (temporarily) from competitive play with Splatoon Raiders, it hasn't made the experience a completely solo affair. After progressing past a certain point in the campaign, you can partner with up to three other players online to hunt for treasure together. Even if you're playing alone, you can still request help from other players, in a nod to Dark Souls and its progeny. On the flip side, you can also respond to someone's call for help. It's a great way to accumulate loot and feel like a part of the bigger Splatoon Raiders community.

Online functionality enhances the value (and replay value) of Splatoon Raiders, but the game would be quite robust without it. Depending on how much side content you pursue and how many times you replay stages on the "spicy" difficulty setting, it should take 15-20 hours to finish the main campaign. However, there is so much more to discover in the post-game. You should prepare yourself for a 40-hour commitment if you want to experience everything and glimpse the true ending.

You should also prepare yourself for some weirdly dissonant music. This is the one area where Nintendo dropped the ball. Most of the themes are fine, even if they fade into the background while you focus on the visual intensity in front of you. There are a handful of tracks, however, that are aggressively unsettling. The worst offender is "Initiation of the Coastonids", which seems designed to make you feel uncomfortable. It's one of the strangest songs I've ever heard in any video game, due to its off-balance rhythm and blaring, discordant horn. Note that all of this seems intentional, in order to create the sensation of an inhospitable, alien environment — as if the soundtrack belonged to the Salmonids and not the heroes. That doesn't excuse it, though.

EPD may have gone astray with music, but it stayed the course in terms of visuals, art direction, and performance. Graphics are sharp and clean; ink textures are appropriately viscous; and enemies are detailed and complex, with lots of moving parts. Production design, which leans heavily on rusty, crusted-over environments and improvised, do-it-yourself weaponry, convincingly transports you to the left-behind, scrappy world of the Salmonids. Most impressively, the game somehow refuses to buckle, delivering a rock-solid 60 fps even when every square inch of the screen is filled with enemies, ink, explosions, and other special effects. Splatoon Raiders features what may be the most hectic game screen I've ever seen, yet I experienced zero technical hiccups. It's phenomenal.

Source: Read the original article on www.vgchartz.com