Splatoon Raiders Review

Salmon Run was always the mode people went to when they were tired of losing at Turf War, and Raiders takes it seriously enough to build a whole game from it. The player is a mechanic rather than a soldier, the Deep Cut trio come along, and the Spirhalite Islands are a sequence of raids where Salmonid hordes arrive, treasure is gathered and an extraction has to be reached before it all goes wrong.

The gadget system is the good idea. Rather than laying traps and watching them work, an approach the team tried and threw out, the player equips secondary armaments that change how the character moves and fights, and the pleasure of the thing is finding the combination that turns an unmanageable crowd into a manageable one. The Switch 2 puts more enemies on screen than the series has handled before, the difficulty curve is judged well, and a harder Spicy mode is there for anyone who wants it.

The reservation is that it reinvents nothing. Under the new frame this is Splatoon movement, Splatoon weapons and Splatoon enemies, and the structure will be familiar to anyone who has played a modern co-operative action game. It sold 474,684 copies in Japan in week one and topped the British chart. The audience did not mind.