The challenge in reviewing most Nintendo games is that, more often than not, it feels less like considering a piece of narrative art than evaluating a playground: The slide has frictionless and smooth mechanics. The swing set has a satisfying arc. The seesaw, on the other hand, is dreadfully imbalanced.
As silly as this sounds, it aligns with how I feel about a game like Splatoon Raiders, which lives and dies by how fun its experiences are as toys and as rides, but offers little else.
It’s too easy to chalk this up to Raiders being a game made for children. Plenty of media made for children, like the early Pixar film canon, have deep, emotional narratives that reach all ages.
The characters in Raiders – the anonymous “Mechanic” and three goofy bandmates – are all high-pitched, diminutive and childlike, with all the worldly concerns of an old Nicktoons roster. They all wear bright colours. Yet adults are invited to enjoy this spectacle, as if we could engage in chaotic paintball warfare without spraining a knee or throwing out our backs, laughing maniacally as we dash about coating everything in colour within this safe digital simulacra.
Childlike frivolity is what is undeniably at work in Raiders. Its matches consist of facing down armies of crawling fishlike enemies, which range from tiny pipsqueaks to gargantuan whales. Your character must coat them with a nearly endless supply of ink until they explode in bursts of colour.
Over the course of the game you’ll unlock weapon categories familiar to most who have played early Splatoon games: rapid-firing squirt pistols, paint brushes, rollers and even glob-tossing buckets. Raiders also offers an assortment of gadgets, allowing you to fire bazookas, use a dash to zip and leap around the stage, and even drop auto-firing turrets and floating mines.
The gameplay additions in Raiders build upon a solid foundation established by the first three Splatoon games. New bells and whistles are needed because Raiders lacks the competitive play mode that defined previous games, which allowed players to battle their squid kid characters against one another in colourful arenas. Those shootouts came with an inherent drama because of the random and unpredictable choices made by other human players, trumping the algorithmic choices of even the most sophisticated enemies.
Lackluster single-player modes have always been an Achilles’ heel of Splatoon, which leaned on multiplayer brilliance. They mostly consisted of puzzle stages, and felt linear and slow next to the freewheeling and fast-paced arenas. Raiders tries to address this concern by taking the series down a purely noncompetitive path.
That approach, when it works, involves mounting and delirious chaos as enemies pour out of sewer grates and flood the stage with their undulating mass. They may be slow and stupid, but as their numbers pile up, the challenge becomes figuring out how to dispatch them all before getting overwhelmed.
This style of encounter, though effective, has its limits. Aside from specific challenge levels, most of the game’s raids occur in wide-open spaces, occasionally spread between island clusters or boxed within underground caverns. The challenge is not navigating its levels – minimalist slices of the franchise’s past multiplayer arenas – but overcoming its ludicrous enemy count.
Frustratingly, your character’s fancy skills have a lot of potential for tackling interesting spatial challenges, but are instead put in service solely to survive these arenas. Few and far between are larger, complex battles against boss types, which offer glimmers of an approach that squares your squid’s astonishing agility against building-size adversaries and vertiginous levels. Far more often, things are kept blindingly simple, mostly a test ground for your gadgets.
It’s all fun enough, as a playground with well-designed jungle gyms and monkey bars. But it feels so small and insignificant as a result. The side characters, while a lively troupe, perform with one-note pantomimes of enthusiasm. They are so jazzed to be here, and are only ever varying levels of jazzed.
The occasional obstacle emerges in their unchanging goal of hoovering up every last trinket and treasure that these islands offer. But once you inevitably clear each level, the minor disappointment is wiped away by maximalist effervescence.
Raiders does have a cooperative online mode that promises to be fun and chaotic, with up to four players facing off against teeming fishy hordes that fill the screen with so many particles that one can almost forgive Nintendo for not including a local multiplayer option. The game is otherwise a lonely affair. It’s just you and the incessant rattle of your sidekicks, constantly reminding you to keep your head up about some challenging raid or making sure you don’t forget about that new compass that’s popped up!
The island setting of Raiders starts off covered in fog and shrouded in mystery. It could be anything, could take the story anywhere. But there really isn’t that much to see, not much offered besides the momentary chance to slide and swing and grasp at an ephemeral childhood innocence. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
(Splatoon Raiders is available on the Switch 2.)
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
