Salmon Run, for starters, is an all-new mode: a co-operative blast through a series of escalating challenges that you could call a horde mode, though doing so seems as unfairly reductive as calling the rest of Splatoon a mere online shooter. You could, through cynical eyes, see this as a mere palette swap, the pink and green that are at the forefront of this sequel taking the place of the orange and blue of the original, but there's more to it than that. Finally, there's a fairly generous single-player campaign where you work your way through a series of smartly designed, self-contained levels.Īll of which is present and correct for Splatoon 2. Ranked play introduces more aggressive, focussed variants for multiplayer with modes such as Splat Zones, where you fight to take possession of two marked areas within the map, or Rainmaker, where you're battling to pass an impressively powerful weapon over a line. There's turf war, the main event, in which two teams of four fight to colour a map.
That core mechanic is spread beautifully across a variety of modes.
Can you blame Nintendo when it got everything down so perfectly first time out? I'm not entirely sure, although it's certainly opened itself up to some criticism.Īt the heart of Splatoon 2, then, is the same formula use your ink to spread delicious globs of colour about a map, diving into pools of the stuff to move around that little bit faster in squid form, or simply shooting it to splat the opposition. This is a sequel that's remarkably reserved - a work of gentle iteration and refinement rather than one that offers any grand reinvention. I won't spoil it, though, and will let you discover the disappointment by yourself.Īnd so, with some inevitability, Splatoon arrives on the Switch, only now it's not quite so novel. Splatoon 2's single-player is for the most part an improvement on the already enjoyable original, though it's let down by a colossal anti-climax.
It's not too much of a leap to ink a line between the success of the Switch and the release of that strange little game a few short years ago. There's been a spark there ever since - be it in the bold reinvention of Zelda for Breath of the Wild, or the stark brilliance of Arms - that's ushered in something of a new golden age for the company. Splatoon also marked the beginning of a shift within Nintendo: it was the first fruit of an emphasis on younger development talent and a newfound willingness to step into the unknown. It's bubblegum chaos of the highest order, an infectiously energetic world that's the perfect foil for the three-minute sugar-pop classics that are Splatoon's multiplayer match-ups. A pop culture event, for one, with live concerts, tie-in animes and a heady fan fever that set in around its deliriously upbeat fiction. In the time since, it's become clear that Splatoon was a little more than that, too. Was Nintendo's colourful Wii U exclusive a shooter or wasn't it? I came away perfectly content with the answer that it was simply a Nintendo game, in the very best definition of the term - something new and exciting and unlike anything else you've played before. An improvement in nearly every way on one of Nintendo's finest games in years, Splatoon 2 is only let down by a lack of big new ideas.Ī couple of years back, there was a struggle to place a label on the original Splatoon.
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