Splatoon 2 (2017)

Splatoon didn’t appeal to me at all in the beginning. The character style wasn’t my cup of tea and I don’t like shooters because my aim is atrocious. It wasn’t until a friend of mine kept raving about it that I decided to pick it up and I’m glad I did!

There is something addicting about this game that I find it difficult to pinpoint, but I find myself constantly going back to it. I find the game quite competitive, especially in league and rank battle where every battles win and loss counts. A couple of times I found myself raging at the screen in frustration after a couple of losses kicked me down a rank level (after some googling I realized my reaction was perfectly normal for this game). But practice and perseverance will pay off in this game. Each round is 4 minutes, which is great if you want to squeeze some game time in before heading out.

The clothes are very stylish in this game and you have a lot of different options. They also have a lot of weapons you could test out and play with. Nintendo is currently still updating it quite often with new weapons, clothes and battle stages. I did try my hand at some shooters, and I was terrible. But after a couple of rounds you get use to the weapon and notice you gradually get better with each game. They also have other weapon options that don’t require you to aim if you feel uncomfortable with the shooter.

I am really enjoying this game, and I can’t recommend it enough to people!

I almost didn't play this game. It came with the only Nintendo Switch bundle with the neon color scheme I wanted when I finally purchased the console a few weeks back, but I wasn't very interested. My aim is awful, so I've just never enjoyed first-person shooters, and every competitive online game I've ever tried has ended in shame and embarrassment. But a friend's recommendation and an episode of Remaster convinced me to give it a shot.

I'm really glad I did! I can't say how it compares to its predecessor, but Splatoon 2 is a ton of fun. I love the Turf War mode, because it lets me shift my strategy from combat to coverage depending on my shortcomings relative to the team, which keeps me engaged. I also like the stats it shows, which helps me identify when I contributed to a loss.

The Salmon Run mode is my second favorite. It can get intense depending on the tide level, but the rush of playing cooperatively is great.

The single-player mode is also quite fun. There were some challenges where the intended path wasn't super clear to me, and 90% of the time I was able to sort of brute-force my way past those segments. But these courses do a genuinely good job of teaching new strategies and ideas that helped me up my game in competitive battles. And I thought the bosses were awesome!

The visual style is great. I've seen comparisons drawn to Jet Set Radio, which I agree with. I've spent more time than I care to admit customizing my character's wardrobe, looking for the right combination of looks and abilities.

I have some minor complaints. Match-making seems inconsistent... multiple times I've been paired with a bunch of players < 10 in level, against a team with like three lv. 20, 30 or even 40 players. Sometimes those lower-level players surprise me (I assume they played the first Splatoon), but most of the time when that happens you just watch as your team gets annihilated. I also find the game's hub a little difficult to navigate, since none of the shops have clear signage I find myself just using the fast-travel menu.

But overall this is the most fun I've had playing a shooter or competitive online multiplayer, so it's a given that it'd earn five stars from me.

Rating: I don't know.

I love Splatoon. Nintendo found something truly special with the first one; it was such a fresh take on the shooter, a game where you could do well by splatting people, but if you suck at that aspect you could hold your own just by being able to ink territory. It was one of the few multiplayer-focused shooters that I could turn on and actually do decent (relatively speaking) as a beginner.

I love Splatoon 2, as well. While it isn't a huge jump forward, it is undeniably a jump forward in ways. It's a better game but it offers me more satisfaction. I'm still able to do decently, I still love the game modes, the attitude, the characters, the visuals, the music, the campaign, and even the humour. I'm going to go ahead and say it that Splatoon is probably the best new IP in years and this is a worthy successor, on a system that is perfect for it.

From a gameplay perspective Splatoon hovers in that same stratosphere as something like Earth Defense Force, which is just fucking fun. No bullshit in terms of gameplay, just amusement, just a good time. It's exactly what Nintendo is and reminds me why I can't quit Nintendo after all these years.

Unfortunately it is also Nintendo in the bad ways. Ninty, figure out the god damn internet. I recently did a challenge on Facebook and it asked me what 3 things I would wish for. I disqualified good health and stuff like that, but I did go with generic responses like lots of money and world peace. My third wish was that Nintendo would figure out the internet. I was joking, mostly, as there's more important things in the world, but there's some truth to it. Splatoon could take over the world if they wouldn't do everything they could to make the online component frustrating.

Stop locking things to different times. I'm not as in love with Salmon Run as others because I'm less of a fan of horde modes, but it is still awesome and a great take on it. So stop locking it to a time period! Some days I've wanted to play it and couldn't. It's like they took their knack for purposely creating hardware shortages and applied it to software. Stop!

Stop rotating stages. It makes you play the same stage over and over. I understand that ranked/league/regular all have different stages (which makes it slightly better), but it's still ridiculous. Stop!

Stop the slog through Turf War to get to other match types. I adore turf war so much, but it is so slow to get to level 10 unless you're a) always on good times or b) awesome. Neither is true to me, but I'm relatively respectable at Turf War at this point. Stop!

I know there are other things that I'm forgetting but those are the main issues I have. Clearly it's not big enough to tank the game because I love all the modes, even if the content is a little low in that regard. But just...

So why can't I give it a rating? I love the game too much to give it an 8, which is what I would probably end up on. And then at the end of the year when I'm compiling my list of the best games this will be incredibly high, but if it was an 8 then that would be weird to me. So that's why it has 5 stars and no numeric rating.

Following the successful launch of the Nintendo Switch and promises of what was to come, I was convinced that Nintendo had finally gotten with the times. But, now that I've played Splatoon 2, I can safely say they're still stuck in the past.

The meat of the game is the PvP, which is just as fun as ever. I've spent countless hours splatting with random players in public matches. The problems start, however, when you want to play with friends. It is only possible to join your friends in public matches when playing in Turf War. To play Ranked Modes with friends, you either have to play a private match (which usually won't result in an 8 player match) or play League Battle, which is locked behind the B- rank. Even then, there is no way to message friends to set up a match within the game, which is inexcuseable for a multiplayer shooter in the current year.

But even worse than the poor matchmaking, is the new multiplayer mode, Salmon Run. This cooperative horde mode is an absolute blast to play, BUT it can only be played online at certain times. I originally didn't think much of this, but after realizing that the schedule is super inconsistent AND it can only be seen in-game (despite SplatNet 2 being a thing), I was furious, enough that I'd considered returning the game. There is absolutely no reason for this entire game mode to be locked behind an inconvenient time schedule. The fun is there, but Nintendo is preventing the player from experiencing it.

Aside from the multiplayer, there is the single player campaign, which felt just "meh" to me. Aside from the boss fights and grind rail levels, the levels felt bland and repetitive. It was fun platforming and splatting enemies, but it got boring doing this over and over again. I also didn't like the bland level design; while more detail was added to the backgrounds when compared to Splatoon 1, the levels are still just floating platforms with the goal of reaching the end. I would've liked to see more detailed environments and more diverse goals, as seen in the few Octarian battle stages.

While the gameplay was mixed for me, the sound and graphics are still excellent. The music is extremely catchy, and there is a lot of detail put into the models (Marina's tentacle is animated slipping through her hands; Yes I was watching Marina's tentacle, ya wanna fight about it?). And while the single player stages were bland, there is a lot of detail put into the plaza and multiplayer stages.

In conclusion, Splatoon 2 is an extremely fun but extremely flawed game. All of the ingredients are there for an amazing online shooter, but Nintendo's poor mixture of them prevents the game from reaching its fill potential. If you enjoyed the first game, you'll like this one. It's more or less an enhanced port, with new features to have fun with and new problems to ruin this fun. Let's hope Nintendo can fix these flaws with their frequent content updates.

Stay off the hook!