Nintendo Reinvented Splatoon as a Looter-Shooter. Players Already Rank It 7th Best Ever

For ten years, the Splatoon series was built on one premise: two teams, one map, and the imperative to cover as much ground as possible in ink. Competitive multiplayer was the franchise’s heartbeat. Splatoon Raiders, released July 23 on the Nintendo Switch 2, throws that premise away. No rival teams. No turf. Instead: co-op raids against Salmonid armies, a mystery-soaked island chain, and a looter-shooter progression loop that owes nothing to the series’ origins and everything to why players are ranking it alongside the greatest games ever made.

In Raiders, players crash-land on the Spirhalite Islands as Inklings or Octolings in the role of mechanics. The territory is crawling with Salmonids, and the story — the first in the franchise to function as a coherent single-player narrative spine — pushes players to investigate the archipelago alongside Deep Cut, the idol trio from Splatoon 3. This is new territory for a series that always held its lore at a careful distance.

The looter-shooter structure replaces Splatoon’s competitive symmetry with a gear loop. Players cycle through more than a hundred weapon variants, customized around three ink tank types — Speed, Power, and Tactical — each altering how a loadout behaves in a raid. A Bot Buddy companion provides in-mission support for solo players. Deep Cut members appear as mechanical allies in the larger raid sequences. The result is a game calibrated for players who would rather spend forty hours tuning a loadout than fifteen minutes in a competitive lobby.

Co-op supports two to four players locally or online, with drop-in/drop-out mechanics that let friends join a host’s ongoing campaign at any point. Difficulty scales to player count automatically. The system works well in practice — it accommodates the Switch 2 household where one person has been playing for thirty hours and another picked up a controller twenty minutes ago.

The reception has split cleanly. Critics awarded Raiders an 81 on Metacritic — a solid score that nonetheless registers as a qualified endorsement. The Guardian placed it at four out of ten. Users told a different story: a 9.3 user score makes Raiders the seventh-highest user-rated game in Metacritic’s history. One month after launch, the gap between professional and player reception is among the widest for any Nintendo release in recent memory.

The divergence follows a recognizable pattern. Critics entering with expectations built on Splatoon’s competitive pedigree found a game that traded the franchise’s tight turf-war loop for something slower and more systemic. Players who arrived via Raiders’ own marketing — which foregrounded raids, co-op, and loot from the start — found the game on its intended terms. What reads as a pale approximation of looter-shooter conventions to a seasoned reviewer reads as a genuinely surprising new direction to a Splatoon fan encountering PvE progression for the first time.

What Nintendo has demonstrated with Raiders is something the company manages periodically and with apparent confidence: the willingness to remake the terms of a franchise. The original Splatoon arrived in 2015 as an ink-based shooter in a market dominated by brown-and-grey military titles. Raiders performs an equivalent move inside its own series — swapping PvP for PvE, ranking tables for loot drops, and spectacle for systems. The Switch 2 hardware, with its improved processing and expanded online infrastructure, gives the game room to operate at a scale the original hardware could not have sustained.

A month in, Splatoon Raiders has held its player engagement. The Metacritic user score tells the story of a game that found its audience even when critics settled elsewhere. If you own a Nintendo Switch 2 and want a co-op game with enough gear progression to last through the autumn, there is no stronger current argument for what to play on it. Raiders may not be the Splatoon sequel anyone expected — that, by now, is clearly the point.

Tags: gaming, nintendo, Nintendo Switch 2, co-op, looter-shooter, Nintendo EPD