Splatoon Raiders

Splatoon Raiders released July 23, 2026, exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2, the series’ first fully standalone singleplayer adventure after previous entries split their focus between campaign and online multiplayer. The result, a PvE-focused Splatoon, is a lot of fun.

Islands surface after some unexplained tectonic activity, and you’re hired as a pilot flying the musical trio Deep Cut, Shiver, Frye, and Big Man, out to scout them for treasure. A burst of bright light triggers turbulent weather, forcing an emergency landing. A month passes, and using your mechanic skills, you cobble together a makeshift boat as a home base to keep exploring. Your first raid reveals the islands are home to Salmonids, aggressive Salmon-like creatures hostile to Inklings and Octolings, and you also uncover a quadruped robot Deep Cut members can pilot to help out. Exploring further means treasure and, slowly, the mystery behind the Spirahlite Islands themselves.

Gameplay is exactly what you’d expect from Splatoon: spray ink across enemies and environments with a rotating weapon set, hold ZL to swim through your own ink for speed and tank refills. The real shift is the PvE focus, clearing waves and hordes of Salmonids, with four-player co-op available for raids. Loot drops during runs: Power Eggs, Spirahlite Crystals, and enemy-specific special drops. There’s a real RNG layer here, since battles have a chance to drop weapons and gadget skills that boost damage or add effects, with better gear appearing more often the deeper you go. Raids also hide Briny Scrolls for lore snippets and Compasses pointing to dens with special challenges.

Everything collected feeds back into your ship to upgrade your base, character, weapons, and gear. New workbenches let you scrap unused weapons for Spirahlite gems and craft specific gear skills. Salmon Eggs upgrade your ink tanks, each representing a distinct playstyle: Speed, Power, and Tactical, each with swappable gadgets, and using each tank enough eventually unlocks abilities from the other two sets.

Singleplayer covers a real variety of raid types: linear Treasure Hunts ending in a relic, open Mining Zones for farming Spirahlite that spawn anomalies the longer you stay, timed Dens where you race to collect enough Power Eggs before the clock runs out, and multi-floor Ruins running the same timer pressure across three levels. Spicy variants crank difficulty for better rewards, and beating the game unlocks the Bottomless Buffet, a floor-by-floor gauntlet culminating in a special boss at level 100.

I’ve enjoyed Splatoon mostly casually. Played the first on Wii U, the second on Switch, skipped the Octo Expansion, never bought the third. Coming back after a real gap, this was a genuine blast. The uniqueness of this post-apocalyptic world where aquatic creatures run everything is a genuinely cool backdrop. The bright, cartoonish visual style plays as a great contrast against how dark the underlying lore gets. Centering the game almost entirely on fighting and uncovering Salmonid lore works well; the designs swing from outright ridiculous to genuinely unsettling, and I like that range a lot. One area for improvement: as the series’ first pure-singleplayer entry, this felt like a missed chance to be a real onramp for new players. The first Splatoon is over a decade old now, and while 2 and 3 were never hard to jump into, Raiders assumes more prior context than it probably should for something positioned this way. Not that it needs to fully cater to newcomers over longtime fans, just that this specific format had a real opportunity to be more welcoming.

The core play is fun. Ink as both weapon and environmental tool remains a genuinely unique idea, and the PvE pivot into horde-clearing is enjoyable and can get legitimately challenging. Go into a zone underleveled or with the wrong loadout and you will get overwhelmed or miss the time limit, which keeps things feeling like a real challenge rather than a formality. Even at the midpoint, I had den runs come down to grabbing the last needed orb with two seconds left, and failed attempts never felt discouraging enough to stop trying again. Difficulty ramps up hard toward the end and postgame, demanding sharper min-maxing, but by then you’ve usually built up enough gear and resources to meet the curve.

The three tanks having genuinely distinct playstyles adds real variety. I rotated through all three trying to fully upgrade everything, and Tactical ended up my favorite, especially once the auto-turret perk turns into an area-covering fountain. Early on I ran Roller between Speed and Power tanks and had just as much fun. It’s the kind of system that rewards actually experimenting.

The story is fine, nothing groundbreaking, but enjoyable. I had no real emotional attachment to Deep Cut going in and still liked their dynamic, though Big Man is the only one I genuinely care about, that’s my guy. The food-and-entree naming scheme across bosses, enemies, and zones is fun, occasionally quirky, balanced out by how dark some designs get. Raiders keeps up the series tradition of wild final bosses, and this one ranks among the best I’ve fought in years, tying directly into lore set up in the second game with a design I genuinely love.

A few real gripes. Levels can feel repetitive, not in the fighting-Salmonids-repeatedly sense, which is fine and fun, but in layout and structure. Different islands, different environments, and early progression still feels somewhat cookie-cutter. Since the focus is fighting rather than traversal, zones lean toward arena design, and a bit more structural variety, maybe sprinkling in more of the traversal mechanics from earlier games, would have helped. RNG drops can also frustrate: duplicate attributes just turn into gems, so you’ll often get skills for gadgets you never use while the one you actually favor feels starved. That’s just how RNG goes sometimes, and base crafting mitigates it, but it’s worth flagging.

This will not click for everyone. The bright cartoonish aesthetic, the garbled dialogue, or the overall gameplay style just won’t land for some people, and that’s a completely fair reaction. For someone who enjoys how weird this series gets, this was a great time. If you already like Splatoon, you’ll like this. If you’re on the fence, I’d recommend it. Fifty dollars is a fair price for what you get; just shop around on the physical copy, since a lot of retailers have brought it down to match the digital price anyway.