Splatoon Raiders Review — Ink, Exploration, and a Genuinely Fresh Direction

For a franchise defined by turf wars and competitive chaos, Splatoon Raiders takes a genuine gamble — trading the series’ signature 4v4 skirmishes for a cooperative, exploration-driven adventure across the mysterious Spirhalite Islands. It’s the boldest structural swing Nintendo has taken with the IP since its 2015 debut, and after a full playthrough alongside two friends, we can say it’s one that mostly justifies itself.

A New Kind of Splat Adventure

Rather than another single-player campaign bolted onto the multiplayer as an afterthought (the traditional Splatoon formula), Raiders builds its entire identity around cooperative discovery. You and up to three friends — or AI companions in solo play — explore the Spirhalite Islands alongside series favorites Deep Cut, investigating a strange energy phenomenon that’s mutating the local wildlife and warping the terrain itself. The framing device is thin by design; Nintendo clearly wants the gameplay loop, not the narrative, to carry the experience, and for the most part it works.

Deep Cut’s dynamic between Shiver, Frye, and Big Man provides most of the personality here, with genuinely funny, well-localized banter that reacts contextually to what you’re doing in the world. It’s a small touch, but it goes a long way toward making the islands feel inhabited rather than just a backdrop for objectives.

Crafting, Survival, and the Ink Loop That Ties It Together

The headline addition is a full crafting and survival layer draped over Splatoon’s traditional ink-based traversal. Gathering Spirhalite crystals and mutated flora to upgrade gear, build temporary structures, and unlock new ink abilities gives exploration actual stakes beyond simple curiosity. It’s a smart structural choice: climbing an ink wall to reach a hidden crystal deposit feels meaningfully different from climbing an ink wall to reach a flag in Turf War, because here the reward directly compounds into your next hour of play.

Combat against the corrupted wildlife blends Splatoon’s core ink-shooting with new environmental tactics — luring enemies into hazard zones, using terrain-changing ink abilities to cut off escape routes, coordinating elemental ink types between squadmates. It never reaches the tactical depth of a dedicated survival-crafting genre leader, but as a hybrid layered onto Splatoon’s already excellent movement tech, it’s consistently satisfying.

Traversal Is Still the Star

What ultimately sells Raiders is that Nintendo hasn’t sacrificed an ounce of what made Splatoon’s movement so distinct. Swimming through ink up walls and across ceilings, transforming between squid and kid forms mid-combo, using ink rails to traverse vast gaps between islands — all of it is present, expanded, and given more room to shine across genuinely large, vertically dense environments than any previous entry. The Spirhalite Islands themselves are a triumph of level design, layering secrets, shortcuts, and vertical challenge routes in a way that rewards the kind of experimental movement veteran players already love.

Where the Formula Shows Cracks

Raiders isn’t without rough edges. The crafting system, while satisfying early on, thins out noticeably in the back half of the roughly 18-hour campaign, with upgrade trees that don’t offer as much meaningful build variety as the genre’s best examples. Some of the mid-game fetch-and-gather objectives also start to repeat structurally, even as the environments around them stay visually fresh.

Solo players should also know that AI-controlled squadmates, while competent, lack the improvisational chaos that makes co-op ink combat so fun with real friends — this is a game meaningfully better experienced with other people.

How It Compares to Splatoon 3

Players wondering how Raiders stacks up against the mainline series’ expansion content will find it a genuinely different beast rather than a direct successor to something like Splatoon 3’s Side Order DLC. Where that expansion offered a tightly designed, roguelite-inflected challenge run, Raiders is a sprawling, open-structured adventure built for methodical exploration and long-term progression across dozens of hours rather than repeated short runs. Neither approach is objectively superior, but Raiders’ willingness to slow down and let players savor its world marks a genuine tonal departure from the series’ traditionally fast-paced identity, and one that we suspect will win over players who previously bounced off Splatoon’s competitive intensity.

Gear, Progression, and Making Ink Feel Personal

Beyond the core crafting loop, Raiders introduces a genuinely satisfying gear progression system built around Spirhalite-infused equipment. Rather than the purely cosmetic gear of competitive Splatoon modes, weapons and outfits here carry functional upgrade paths — increased ink tank capacity, faster ink-wall climbing, elemental resistance against the islands’ corrupted wildlife. Min-maxing your loadout for a particularly tricky boss encounter or a treacherous vertical climb adds a layer of build-crafting satisfaction that’s genuinely new for the franchise, and it’s implemented with enough clarity that younger players (a core part of Splatoon’s audience) should have no trouble understanding it.

Boss encounters against the corrupted Spirhalite wildlife are a particular highlight, each demanding a distinct combination of ink-color strategy, terrain awareness, and squad coordination. One mid-game encounter against a massive, ink-absorbing crustacean boss forced our three-player squad to split responsibilities — two players baiting attacks while a third climbed exposed ink-walls to strike a weak point — in a way that felt more thoughtfully choreographed than we expected from a franchise better known for fast, chaotic skirmishes than boss design.

Multiplayer Squad Dynamics

Playing Raiders with a coordinated three-player squad reveals a level of systemic depth that solo play only hints at. Ink-color synergy between squadmates becomes a genuine strategic consideration — pairing complementary elemental ink types to trigger combo effects against tougher enemies, or dividing crafting responsibilities so that one player focuses on resource gathering while others handle combat and exploration. Voice chat integration on Switch 2 makes coordinating these strategies considerably smoother than in past Nintendo online offerings, a welcome sign that the company is finally taking online infrastructure more seriously. Drop-in, drop-out matchmaking for players without a pre-formed squad works reliably too, connecting us with reasonably skilled random players in under a minute during peak hours throughout our review period.

Presentation and Sound Design

Visually, Raiders is one of the most vibrant games on Switch 2 to date, leaning into a painterly, high-contrast art style for the Spirhalite Islands that distinguishes each region — bioluminescent caverns, wind-swept cliffside villages, corrupted crystal forests — with real visual personality. The soundtrack, a franchise strength since the very first game, continues that tradition with an eclectic mix of J-pop-inflected battle themes and more atmospheric, exploration-focused compositions that shift dynamically based on whether you’re in combat, crafting, or simply wandering. It’s some of Nintendo’s best sound design work this generation, full stop.

Performance on Switch 2 hardware was largely stable throughout our roughly 18-hour playthrough, both docked and in handheld mode, with only isolated frame rate dips during the busiest four-player boss encounters featuring heavy ink particle effects on screen simultaneously.

Pros & Cons

• + A genuinely fresh structural direction for the franchise
• + Crafting and survival mechanics add real stakes to exploration
• + Some of the best vertical level design in the series’ history
• + Deep Cut’s writing and localization are consistently charming
• − Crafting depth thins out in the back half of the campaign
• − Some fetch-objective repetition despite fresh environments
• − Solo play with AI companions loses some of the magic

“It turns out ink-based traversal was always secretly begging for a survival-crafting playground — and the Spirhalite Islands deliver exactly that.”

The Verdict

Splatoon Raiders proves there’s real life in this franchise beyond competitive turf wars, and Nintendo deserves credit for taking a genuine structural risk rather than iterating safely on a formula that already sells well. The crafting and survival layer doesn’t reach genre-topping depth, and the campaign’s second half occasionally coasts on the goodwill built by its opening hours, but the sheer quality of movement, level design, and co-op chemistry makes this one of the most purely enjoyable Switch 2 exclusives of the year so far. If Nintendo builds on this foundation for a sequel, they may have stumbled onto Splatoon’s next great pillar.

A Note for Competitive Players

Splatoon veterans who came to the franchise strictly for Turf War and ranked competitive play should temper their expectations accordingly — Raiders is not a replacement for that experience, and Nintendo has been clear it’s a separate, standalone offering rather than a substitute for the series’ traditional multiplayer suite. Approached on its own terms, however, as a cooperative exploration adventure that happens to share its combat DNA with one of gaming’s most distinctive shooters, it’s an easy recommendation, and one of the more pleasant surprises we’ve played this year. Bring friends if you can; the islands are considerably more fun with company.

Longevity and Post-Launch Support

Nintendo has already confirmed additional free content updates planned for the months following launch, including new island regions and expanded boss encounters, which bodes well for a game whose crafting-and-exploration loop is compelling enough to sustain a genuine long tail. Based on what’s here at launch, we’d estimate most players can expect 18 to 25 hours to see the core story through, with considerably more time available for those chasing full gear progression and optional boss content.