‘Splatoon Raiders’ hands-on preview: Nintendo’s new looter looks like the closest thing it has to ‘Borderlands’, ‘Destiny’ or ‘Diablo’

Splatoon Raiders is a game for the loot freaks. The first spin-off in Nintendo’s normally multiplayer-focused, third-person shooter series, Raiders is a mostly single-player adventure that’s similar to progression-heavy games like Borderlands or Destiny. It’s still built on the core mechanics of past Splatoon games — you’re a cute little squid-person dousing the floor with ink, which you can dive into to get around faster and refill ammo — but here the focus is on hunting for better gear and upgrading your character’s build, chasing dopamine hit after dopamine hit along the way. 

The game arrives as a Switch 2 exclusive on July 23, but I was able to play it for well over an hour during a preview event in New York City earlier this month. My session was broken up into three parts: a quick run through the tutorial and opening section; a jump forward to some later levels after the main character had progressed from level one to level 10 and unlocked more abilities; and a few brief co-op multiplayer runs with other players. It’s not often that a Nintendo game goes full “lizard brain” so directly, but based on the bits I’ve played, I can see Raiders finding a home with folks looking for a more accessible and family-friendly take on the looter concept.

My demo didn’t give much away in terms of story, but the setup is simple enough. You play as “the mechanic,” a customizable but silent protagonist who’s crash-landed on the mysterious Spirhalite Islands. You’re joined by Deep Cut, a trio of sassy musicians who flew to the islands in search of potential loot. (They previously appeared in Splatoon 3.) The game picks up a month after the group crashed, when they’ve set up shop on a boat and started to explore what the islands hold. 

Like past Splatoon games, the tone is lighthearted, witty and kid-friendly. It’s a game where one of your buddies is a big manta ray named “Big Man” who only says the word “Ay!” I wouldn’t expect an especially gripping drama, then, though Splatoon does have surprisingly dark lore.

The real point of Splatoon Raiders looks to be its feedback loop. If you’ve played a loot game before, it’ll feel familiar. You start at your ship hub, pick a region on the map — this isn’t an open-world game — and make your way forward, shooting through mobs of mutant fish baddies called Salmonids, leveling up, collecting gear and resources as you go. When you clear a level (or “raid”), you regroup at the hub, see what you got, then upgrade your character and loadout accordingly. Each run brings the promise and allure of more power gained. The stronger you get, the more challenges you can take on, starting the loop all over again.

Notably, if you fail a raid, you still keep any experience points, weapons and items you gained during the run. In that sense, this is a gentler looter than many of its peers. Along those lines: Raiders has three difficulty levels, but Nintendo says those only affect enemy strength, not the things you can acquire. 

Within the core loop are a bunch of systems to mess around with. There’s a good variety of base ink-firing weapons, for one, from basic pistol-style shooters or charged long rifles to giant paint rollers or a child’s sand bucket that chucks ink around. Many of these will be familiar to Splatoon veterans, but they’re cuter than typical shooter game weapons either way. I didn’t see any way to craft weapons from scratch, but you’ll acquire ones with random perks and stat rolls as you play, and you can manually upgrade weapons in your inventory from the ship hub with the right materials. 

With each excursion, you pick a Deep Cut companion to join you in a little walking mech. You direct them to dig up loot at designated spots, and if you collect enough “power eggs” dropped by the Salmonids to fill up a special meter, they can unleash a “showstopper” attack to help you clear out a combat zone. Big Man, for example, can temporarily become invincible and ram into enemies to damage them while summoning a ring of smaller mantas around him. Another one has your buddy deal huge damage in a straight line by summoning a giant shark. Fun!

You equip one of three ink “tanks”: Power, Speed or Tactical. These are essentially the game’s character classes — if you’ve ever played Destiny, think of them like Titans, Hunters and Warlocks. The Power Tank is focused on dealing raw damage, the Speed Tank puts more emphasis on evasion and quicker movement, while the Tactical Tank is more about strategic weaponry and area control. You can freely switch between these as you play, and you level each one up independently by collecting eggs from defeated enemies with that class equipped. 

Each tank allows you to equip specific “gadgets,” which are special weapons tied to a cooldown timer. With the Tactical Tank, for instance, you can deploy an auto-firing turret or a giant ink-filled balloon that splatters ink in a wide radius when shot. The Power Tank lets you charge forward and swipe at enemies with an axe or equip a floating ring of discs around you that deal damage and ink up the ground as you move. The Speed Tank has a “Blast Boot” that lets you jump into a crowd of enemies and create an explosion as you land and a “Dash Bomb” that lets you dash away from trouble while creating a similar explosion when you zoom off.

There are several more gadgets to unlock beyond those, and at some point before level 10 you gain the ability to equip two at once. Each one is also customizable with different gadget parts you collect from your raids. This is the game’s take on weapon mods. For example, you can make it so your floating disc-ring (“Splatellites,” as they’re called) lasts longer and covers a wider area. With the “Splatchet” axe, you can equip damage and area-of-effect boosters too, plus special perks like the ability to swipe vertically instead of horizontally (which is good for attacking flying enemies). 

The catch is that each gadget only has a certain amount of modifier slots, and the better the mod, the more slots it takes up. A “Splatellite Area Up” part that makes your disc-ring cover a 60 percent larger range can be helpful, but it might also take up half of that gadget’s open slots, leaving you with less room to add other perks than a similar part that only gives a 20 percent boost.

On top of this are “relic powers,” which are general character perks. The “Lifesaver” relic, to give one example, speeds up your HP and damage recovery rate. “Ink Pro” reduces the amount of ink your weapon uses with each shot. “Midair Jump” lets you do… a mid-air jump. You can only equip one or two of these early on, but as you level up your tanks — increasing your total health, weapon and gadget damage or gadget slot allowance in the process — you can equip more. 

All of these interweaving systems are straight out of other looter games, but you can see how they give you plenty of space to tinker and optimize your build for the way you want to play. By the end of my demo I had gravitated toward a risky in-your-face setup with the Power Tank and a shotgun-like main weapon, modding my axe to do as much damage as possible whenever I charged into mobs while using the “Splatellites” to cover my tracks with ink when I had to retreat to safety. You may prefer a speed build that lets you dash in and out with a melee-style weapon, a tactical build where you sit farther back with a long gun while your gadgets do most of the work, and so on.   

Underpinning all of this are the things that’ve always made Splatoon games stand out. There’s still a compelling tension to zipping around and making sure the ground is sufficiently covered with ink — thus ensuring you have escape routes and a way to recharge your health and ammo — while simultaneously firing at hordes of enemies who mark the territory for themselves. It remains a shooter about positioning as much as precise aiming. Swimming through ink is still fast and fluid, a stark contrast to the relatively heavy movement your character has on dry land.

Some of the later raids and boss fights during my demo got delightfully chaotic, a symphony of ink, damage indicators, chirpy sound effects and exploding baddies. They took me a few tries on the standard difficulty as well, which is good, since games like this work best when you’re incentivized to go back and tinker with your loadout to find solutions.  

While Splatoon Raiders is primarily a single-player experience, you can also run through the game with up to three others in co-op. Nothing fundamentally changed when I tried this out during my demo; it just made things a bit more hectic, as there was more happening onscreen at once. Nintendo didn’t tell me exactly how enemies scale when you add more players to the mix, but a company representative said that it’s less than a one-to-one conversion, so the game should be slightly easier if you play with friends.

There’s also a “Call for Help” feature that lets solo players bring in another person to assist them through a given stage. This appears similar to the summoning feature you can use in games like Elden Ring to get (or lend) a hand with boss fights.

I do have a few concerns. The first is that most of the environments in my demo had little character. There were some light platforming bits in a few spots, but for the most part I just ran from objective point to objective point across largely flat terrains with few memorable features, clearly defined combat zones and relatively drab colors. By the end I could barely remember which area I had explored was which, so this might not be a game with dynamic world-building. The chase for upgrades is the point. 

Beyond that, while the game’s core movement and shooting was responsive, enemies largely behaved like bullet sponges, bags of numbers designed to be hit instead of actual living creatures. There’s more variety as the game progresses, but even then most mobs I came across would simply trundle towards me, if they moved at all. Any difficulty during my demo stemmed more from the game throwing an overwhelming number of enemies onscreen at the same time. 

Nevertheless, I felt myself getting hooked on Splatoon Raiders‘ loop the more I played. Did that have more to do with the almost inherent addictiveness of looters as a whole than anything this specific game is doing? Maybe! But Nintendo’s latest seems to get at what makes these kind of games appealing. It looks to be a meticulously designed carrot on a stick, a game for people who want to run around, chase the shiny things and make the numbers go up. We’ll see how well the full game holds up when it releases next month.