Splatoon Review
If you’re someone familiar at all with my comments about Nintendo over the years, you might fall under the assumption that I’m not a fan of the company’s games—but that’s not at all the case. I like plenty of the games the Kyoto-based publisher has put out over the years—just, usually, not its bread-and-butter releases like Mario or Zelda or Donkey Kong or Pokemon. No, my interest in the company is in its more niche, out-there stuff, things like Rhythm Heaven, or Style Savvy, or Ouendan (the pre-Westernization version of Elite Beat Agents).
Nintendo has this amazing skill for making even its lowest-profile games look and feel special, and that’s especially true with Splatoon. From the moment I saw its reveal last year, I was enthralled with the House of Mario’s take on the third-person shooter genre, and the bizarre paintball-meets-sea-life aspect at the heart of the concept. At a point when we’re now inundated by similarly styled shooters that can sometimes be hard to tell apart, Splatoon looked completely stylish and different.
After now experiencing the full game, Splatoon doesn’t just look the part—it is fresh and unique. Sure, at its core, you’ll find ideas that are pretty familiar in the genre: two teams of four players facing off against one another with customized characters, with the goal to defeat the other team by earning the most points. Except, here, success won’t come thanks to your kill/death ratio—it’s completely centered around how much of the playfield is covered by your team’s paint color versus that of your opponent’s once the round ends.
When I first played the Splatoon open beta, I worried if the concept would stay interesting and enjoyable for the long haul. Ten solid hours of pre-release multiplayer later, I’m still wishing I were playing the game instead of writing about it. The whole “cover the world in paint-like ink” idea is such a simple one on paper, but it’s an utterly fantastic setup for some real competition when executed. When it’s not about taking or defending a few random points on a map, but instead fighting back and forth for control over the entire map, each and every battle can get seriously intense.
There aren’t any gimmies in Splatoon—no one point you can camp to get the job done, no one main tactic you can always employ to constantly ensure victory. Strategy really has to be considered here, and that’s especially important when picking which main and sub-weapons you’ll be running with. While not all of the options are as creative as they could be—a few too many of them are essentially ink-shooting guns differing in range or damage but feeling quite similar otherwise—some hugely change not only your own personal techniques but also the overall match flow. By far the most interesting inclusion at this point is the Splat Roller, a paint roller–esque device that’s especially good at covering a lot of ground with your team’s color as fast as possible. It’s a weapon that wouldn’t really work in any other game out there—and it’s a perfect example of how Nintendo’s trademark style of development can produce some standout ideas.
Really, for a publisher that’s had so little experience in this genre, Nintendo absolutely nailed everything that was needed to have a game that’s as cutthroat as it is cute. And, oh my, is it ever cute. Even given my bias for anything that comes out of Nintendo that isn’t a portly Italian plumber, Splatoon’s Inklings are easily one of the company’s best cast of characters since Animal Crossing’s introduction. They’re a great balance of adorable, iconic, and slightly sinister, and while humanoid-creatures-that-can-transform-into-squids-and-then-swim through-or-up-trails-of-paint seems like it should make no sense at all, they make perfect sense while playing. Of course my Inkling girl can become a squid and disappear into my team’s paint splotches. And somehow swim through said paint, even though it’s only a thin liquid coating on the ground. While also refilling her weapon’s ink reserves while doing so, even though I’m sucking up the exact same paint I just laid down. That all makes perfect sense.
Splatoon’s visuals really help sell the entire package in so many ways, but while I can’t get over how adorable the Inklings (and their enemies) are, the true star here is something many people might not give much notice: the multi-colored paint itself. The way the ink covers the landscape and mixes with other colors is impressively realistic at times. Nintendo has put a lot of time into making the ink look like far more than a flat texture, and how it stains bricks after the excess drips off is far different than the results on metal, or wood, or the other building materials in the Inkling’s world.
Man, though, the blue ink. It’s so blue. And so thick-looking. And so…weirdly ominous. It legitimately makes me feel anxious enough whenever it’s one of the two colors in a match that I wish I could somehow take it out of the color rotation.
Speaking of matches, the real meat to Splatoon—the reason you’re going to want to play and continue playing—is indeed its 4-vs-4 competitive matches. However, the game does also feature a full single-player component, and this is where the game’s main foes—the sinister octopus army—come into play. Here, you’ll travel across a wide variety of worlds, each of which focuses on a certain gameplay concept, or gimmick, or set challenge. And, for those players who have any of the three Splatoon amiibo, you can connect them to the game to unlock variants on all of these stages, with exclusive Inkling gear the reward for their completion.
The single-player portion of the game certainly isn’t bad, but for me, it was something to do when there weren’t enough players online to battle. I’d look at Splatoon as I would, say, a fighting game: Yeah, there’s content for those who really want something to play solo, but don’t feel bad if you spend most of your time on the multiplayer side of things. (Though, to be fair, you will miss out on one heck of a weird backstory for the game if you don’t venture into that mode.)
As I turn to my disappointments with the game, things get really complicated. As a full-priced, standard retail release coming out here in the month of May, Splatoon feels unfinished and rushed to market—an absolutely strange thing to say for a product coming from Nintendo. However, it has already outlined specific plans for a free update to Splatoon that’ll be coming in August, one that’ll bring with it features and expansions that directly address a number of the criticisms that I have.
It’s a tough position to be in, because while I need to review the game as it is now, this isn’t an “I hope they fix these things” situation—it’s an “I know they’re being fixed; I just have to wait a few months” one. While I’m going to trust that that is indeed the case, it’s still my job to let you know what’s blatantly missing at this point.
Splatoon’s matchmaking is many kinds of awful as of now. That’s not to say it doesn’t work, because it does—across all the competitive matches I took part in when I was lucky enough to find seven other members of the game media online, only once was the lag between players obvious. The problem is that the game feels as if it were created in a void where none of the development team had ever bothered to play another online game, leaving them lacking in the knowledge of what to do—or not—when it comes to bringing players together.
At launch, you’ll only have three matchmaking options available: Regular Battle (which serves as your basic quick match), Regular Battle with friends (an option of questionable use where, if someone on your friends list is in a lobby that hasn’t filled up yet, you can join them), and Ranked Battle (which unlocks once you reach level 10 ranking and provides a different match type than Turf War).
In one of the strangest oversights I’ve seen in a while, if you jump into Regular Battle, you have no way to back out from searching for other players—even if you’re the only person in the room. You have to sit there until the timer runs out, which can be frustrating if it’s obvious the eight slots needed to get a game going won’t be filled, because every time somebody hops in, the timer gets extended. You also have absolutely no access to switching out equipment while you’re waiting for a game to kick off—so if you jumped into Splatoon’s quick match without changing weapons as you’d meant to do, you’ll either have to play an entire match with whatever you already had equipped or just sit there waiting for the search to time out.
As of now, there’s no word on anything being done to fix that particular situation—but there isgood news coming in terms of the overall matchmaking system. Come August, you’ll gain the ability to team up with three other friends and search for games together as a set squad. Even better, players will also be able to make their own private rooms at that point—an option that really should already exist, but one that thankfully won’t be a red mark on the game for too long. The current roster of maps is rather anemic, but that, too, will be improved in the weeks ahead as new battlegrounds get released in regular content updates, along with additional weapons and game modes.
Speaking of maps, though, I’d love for Nintendo to reconsider its decision to only have a small handful of the game’s maps available at any one time—it’s a peculiar choice that may cause some players to get burned out on particular stages after playing them over and over in quick succession. Also, while having a pop idol duo called the Squid Sisters announce when map rotation sets are refreshed at set intervals is a neat little element of world-building, having those virtual TV broadcasts kick you out of the matchmaking lobby every time they occur is such a bizarre decision.
That leaves one major complaint that many have leveled against Splatoon: its lack of voice chat. To be honest, I’m mixed on this one. On one hand, yeah, it would be nice, especially given how important strategy and teamwork are. On the other hand, though, it’s totally possible to play smart and support your teammates given only what the game offers. As disappointed as I was at first to learn of the lack of Pro Controller support in Splatoon (outside of the game’s local-only 1-vs-1 mode), keeping an eye on the map displayed on the GamePad often imparts enough information to let you know exactly where you need to attack or defend—and which members of your squad could potentially use some backup at any given moment.
I know that’s a lot of time spent on the negatives of Splatoon. Some of them will absolutely be addressed not only by the larger August content expansion but also in the smaller updates that come between now and them—though it’s totally reasonable to wonder why so many of them are missing from the game right now, when it’s being burned to a disc and boxed up and sold on store shelves. And yet, I nitpick certain portions of Nintendo’s latest release because of just how much I enjoyed it otherwise. It’s frustrating to have to say that Splatoon will be better in a few months or to once again put up with Nintendo’s lack of understanding about robust online options. There are so many fantastic moments to be had now, so much potential for this idea, this world, and these characters if players are willing to give Splatoon’s weaker moments a pass until some of them get better.
Most of the time, my recommendation at this point would be to wait until the game matures into what its developer promises it’ll be, and I’m not sure that isn’t still the smartest route to take here. And yet, given the Wii U’s lack of fresh, constant releases, I don’t know that you should wait to pick this one up. Splatoon is one of the most unique, satisfying, and enjoyable games I’ve played lately—either on or off Nintendo’s current console—and having a good-but-incomplete game now is sometimes better than having a great game later.
Oh, but one last thing before I go: Just say no to gyro aiming. Only those slimy Octolings play that way, and you don’t want to be a slimy Octoling—do you?
| B Good | Nintendo’s newest cast of characters leaves their mark on the third-person shooter genre in Splatoon, one of the freshest and most exciting competitive multiplayer experiences so far this year. It’s just a shame that we’ll need to wait a few more months for some of the game’s basic functions to be fully implemented. But seriously, the trauma that blue ink causes me. It’s like looking into the abyss. |
| Splatoon was reviewed using review code, physical copies, or hardware provided by Nintendo. Scores are graded on a scale of E (Bad) to S (Special) in homage to Japanese video game grading scales, with the understanding that an S still does not denote a "perfect" score. Scores may have been adjusted from the original source to better fit my personal scale. | |