Splatoon Raiders review – salmon fishy going on

Nintendo turns the Splatoon franchise into a primarily single-player game, based on the popular Salmon Run mode, but is it as much fun on your own as it is with friends?

One day we hope not to start a Nintendo review with a commentary on their strange decision-making and perplexing priorities for the Switch 2. That day is not today, because the overriding thought with Splatoon Raiders is… why?

Although it’s had a more modest impact in the West, Splatoon is hugely successful in Japan, where 2022’s Splatoon 3 became the biggest video game launch ever and where massive music concerts attract thousands of fans. The popularity is well deserved as, in the West, the games are sorely underappreciated, as highly original third person online shooters that are quite unlike anything else around (especially now clone Foamstars has been shut down).

The problem with the Splatoon sequels is that they changed almost nothing about the original game, with Splatoon 3 in particular having so little in the way of new content or ideas it’d make Call Of Duty blush. You’d therefore think Splatoon 4 would be an easy game to get ready for the Switch 2 launch, and an obvious priority, but no. Instead, we’ve got Splatoon Raiders, a mostly single-player only game that also doesn’t do anything new.

It’s tempting to assume that Splatoon Raiders was originally just DLC for Splatoon 3 that, in the usual Nintendo fashion, exceeded its original goals. But Splatoon 3 already has single-player DLC and like the single-player modes for all the Splatoon games it’s… okay. Splatoon was primarily designed as an online game and while simulating aspects of that gameplay in single-player can be relatively entertaining, it usually lacks the speed and intensity of the multiplayer modes.

Splatoon Raiders’ big idea is that it’s trying to emulate the co-op Salmon Run mode, first introduced in Splatoon 2, rather than the gameplay of the main competitive modes. Salmon Run is excellent, but it does ignore the paintball aspect of the other modes, so that your guns are used as more traditional third person weapons – although they still have the benefit of shooting ink, which you can travel in more quickly and use to refill your ammo.

The first missed opportunity for the game is that there’s almost no story. You’re an unnamed mechanic helping idol group Deep Cut to search for treasure, in order to get Splatsville out of a debt crisis. It’s unclear why they thought there’d be any treasure in the hidden archipelago they crash onto, but it turns out it’s actually home to the Salmonids – the cannon fodder enemies from the Salmon Run mode. Not only is there virtually no plot but Deep Cut come across as entitled divas most of the time, which all seems a major missed opportunity.

Since there’s no narrative to add structure, you end up just picking raids according to your current character level and how well that matches against the stated Salmonid threat. If you try and take a quick path through the game – by only completing the raids essential to opening up progress – you’re quickly going to come up against ones that are almost impossible to beat. So in that sense there is level-grinding, but if you just play each raid in turn there’s almost no need to repeat anything, until the post-game.

There are a number of different raid types, with the core story levels being similar to the single-player modes from previous Splatoon games. That means the map design is very linear and obvious, with slow and laborious progression that is nothing like the fast-paced excitement of the multiplayer. The variants where you’re touring a small open world map, trying to collect enough Salmonid eggs to drill a crystal, whose shards are the main in-game currency, are a little more engaging, but only a little.

You quickly begin to realise that Splatoon Raiders is at its best the closer it sticks to the Salmon Run formula, and the further away it gets from that the less interesting it becomes – including the optional dungeons that are puzzle-based assault courses meant to teach you how to use gadgets (we’ll get to them in a moment). That said, the raids that are just a single-player variant of Salmon Run, either on one map or several that have to be completed in a row, are hugely entertaining.

The gunplay and movement of Splatoon is superb, and always has been, with the optional gyro aiming working so well we miss it in every console-based shooter we play, especially because the PlayStation DualSense controller could use it if it chose to. Salmon Run’s goals are very simple – collect a set number of eggs before the timer runs out – but it never gets old, either here or in the mainline games. But apart from some fun boss battles the only other part of Splatoon Raiders that’s truly engaging is acquiring loot and upgrading your character and weapons.

Your character has a limited set of stats and a level ranking, while the weapons have a level and, in rare cases, one or two buffs. The full range of weapon types from Splatoon 3 are included, from simple paint guns and buckets to paint rollers and paint-flinging swords. There’s also a range of gadgets that can be upgraded with extra buffs and abilities, by either earning the upgrades as loot or crafting them with collected resources.

The gadgets are the only new mechanic in the game and include an impressive variety of devices, from an auto turret and floating bombs that can be chain-linked together, to little paint satellites that rotate around you, various melee attacks, and a paint boomerang – plus a variety of gadgets to give you extra speed or jumping abilities. They’re fun to use but apart from a super attack, that takes ages to build up, that’s it in terms of genuinely new gameplay ideas.

After an hour or so you unlock the ability to call in online players to help you on a map, otherwise you only get a member of Deep Cut piloting a dumpy little mech. While online co-op is fun, and turns the game into something even closer to the original Salmon Run, it’s not really necessary to progress, as the game’s not that challenging on standard difficulty. Although unusually for a Nintendo game there is a harder mode available from the start.

Although everything is perfectly entertaining when you’re playing the Salmon Run raids, which accounts for about half the game, none of the other stuff is particularly fun and the linear levels are downright boring. The game’s not entirely full price, so Nintendo seem to recognise that this is something short of essential, but it’s not cheap enough to really forgive anything.

The best parts of Splatoon Raiders are highly enjoyable but it’s still a very slight and thoroughly unnecessary game. It’s a minor diversion, that for veterans of the series only makes the wait for Splatoon 4 more painful, while for those new to the franchise it’s enough of a mixed offering to make them wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £41.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Release Date: 23rd July 2026
Age Rating: 7

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