Splatoon 3

There is no other shooter like this, and that’s not marketing copy — it’s a structural fact about the genre. Since 2015, Nintendo EPD has been running the only major competitive shooter franchise where killing people is a means, not the win condition. Splatoon 3, released for the Nintendo Switch in September 2022, is the third and most refined iteration of that idea.

The premise remains gloriously stupid and gloriously smart at once. You are an Inkling or an Octoling — a squid-kid hybrid with a haircut that looks like it costs more than your rent — and you can toggle between a humanoid form that shoots ink and a squid form that swims through that ink. Swimming refills your tank, hides you from enemies, and moves you faster than running. That single toggle is the entire game. Every weapon, every map, every objective in Splatoon 3 is a variation on the question: who controls the floor?

Splatoon 3 relocates the action from the neon-metropolitan Inkopolis of the first two games to the Splatlands, a sun-bleached desert wasteland, and its hub city Splatsville. It’s a Mad Max-by-way-of-Harajuku aesthetic pivot that reads as bolder than it plays — the ink is still ink, the turf is still turf.

Commercially, it’s a monster, sitting among the best-selling titles in the Switch library, sustained by one of the most loyal communities in the medium. Critically, it landed well, but with an asterisk that every review wrote in a slightly different way: this is Splatoon 2 with better everything. Player sentiment sits noticeably lower, and the gap between those two numbers is the most interesting thing about this game. Critics saw a review window. Players see years of matches. The complaints only show up in the second timeframe.

• Turf War (4v4): Three minutes. Cover more ground in your team’s ink than the other team. Splatting opponents matters only because a respawning player isn’t inking. It’s a territory control game wearing a shooter’s clothes, and it remains the most original competitive mode in the genre.
• Anarchy Battles: The ranked tier, running Splat Zones, Tower Control, Rainmaker, and Clam Blitz. These are the modes with actual competitive integrity — objective-driven, positionally demanding, and rotating on a timer so you can’t just grind your one comfortable map.
• Salmon Run Next Wave: Four-player horde co-op against Salmonid bosses, with randomized loadouts you don’t choose. The big change from Splatoon 2: it’s always available, not gated to scheduled shifts. This alone fixed the series’ worst design decision.
• Return of the Mammalians: The single-player campaign, structured as puzzle-boxes across the Alterna crater. Inventive as a weapon tutorial, short as a campaign.
• Tableturf Battle: A collectible card game where you play turf war on a grid. It has no business being as good as it is.
• Seasonal Catalogs & Splatfests: A free, rolling cosmetic progression track and community-wide three-way faction events, including chaotic Tricolor Turf War matches where one team defends against two.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is excellent, and it’s worth being specific about why rather than just asserting it.

Most shooters are subtractive. You reduce the enemy team’s health to zero, and you win. Splatoon is additive — you’re building something, constantly, and the enemy is building over it. This inverts the risk calculus in a way that changes how the game feels minute to minute. In Call of Duty, retreating is a neutral act. In Splatoon 3, retreating is only viable if there’s ink on the floor behind you to swim through. Your escape route is a resource you had to manufacture earlier. Aggression and infrastructure are the same activity.

That’s the design insight the whole franchise sits on, and Splatoon 3 tunes it more sharply than either predecessor. Weapon balance is tighter. The special weapons — Splatoon 2’s weakest system, where a few specials could single-handedly decide a match — have been rebuilt around area denial and repositioning rather than instant-win buttons. The new Squid Surge and Squid Roll movement techniques add a genuine skill ceiling to traversal: rolling out of your ink flips your direction and grants brief bullet immunity, which turns duels into something closer to a fighting game exchange than a pure aim contest.

Salmon Run is where the sequel earns its number. Next Wave adds the Egg Throw — you can lob power eggs across the map instead of physically carrying them — which transforms a mode that was about panicked jogging into one about spatial logistics and communication under pressure. The King Salmonid encounters give shifts a genuine climax. And making it permanently available instead of schedule-gated is the sort of fix that sounds like a footnote and is actually the difference between a mode people love and a mode people remember fondly.

Where It Iterates Instead of Innovates

Here’s the fair criticism, and it’s the one nearly every review landed on: if you put a Splatoon 2 match and a Splatoon 3 match side by side, a non-player could not tell them apart. The maps are new. The weapons are new. The feel is not. For a franchise whose entire identity was built on doing something nobody else was doing, spending an entire generation on refinement rather than reinvention is a defensible choice that still leaves something on the table.

Return of the Mammalians is the clearest example. It’s charming, well-paced, and structurally clever — Alterna’s mission-select hub with its hidden paths is a real improvement over Splatoon 2’s linear kettle progression. But it’s easy, it’s short, and it exists primarily as a laboratory for teaching weapons you’ll then use online. Compare it to the Side Order DLC, which arrived later and was received substantially better precisely because it took a swing: a roguelike tower climb with build-crafting, permanent progression, and actual difficulty. Side Order is what a Splatoon campaign should be. It’s telling that Nintendo had to sell it separately to justify making it.

The Interface Is the Enemy

This is where the goodwill runs out.

Splatoon 3 has, by a wide margin, the worst between-match friction of any modern competitive shooter. Every session begins with a mandatory news broadcast from Deep Cut. Every map rotation announcement plays out at its own pace. Menu dialogue you have read four hundred times cannot be meaningfully skipped. In a game whose median session is a stack of three-minute matches, the connective tissue between matches is a tax paid repeatedly, and it compounds into genuine resentment.

To be clear, Nintendo did fix real problems here. You can change your entire loadout between matches without leaving the lobby — a Splatoon 2 sin that required a full return to the plaza. The lobby has a practice range so players are inking targets during matchmaking instead of staring at a spinner. Someone on that team understood the assignment. They just weren’t allowed to finish it.

Netcode: The Structural Flaw

Splatoon 3 runs on peer-to-peer networking. Not dedicated servers. In 2022. For a first-party title from the most profitable game company on earth.

The consequences are exactly what you’d predict. Latency is inconsistent and host-dependent. Hit registration in close-range duels — the exact moments that decide ranked matches — is hostage to whoever happens to be hosting. And when one player’s connection drops, the entire lobby is dissolved with a “Communication Error,” wiping progress for seven other people who did nothing wrong. Compounding this: Nintendo’s voice chat solution routes through a smartphone app rather than the console, which for a team-coordination game is an ergonomic non-starter.

This is the single largest gap between critic scores and player scores. It’s invisible in a review week. It’s unavoidable across a thousand matches.

The art direction is exceptional and remains the franchise’s most durable asset. The Splatlands’ sun-scorched palette gives the ink more contrast to work against, and the character design — a mix of streetwear maximalism, punk sensibility, and genuine fashion literacy — is the rare video game aesthetic that looks like actual young people made it rather than a focus group approximating them.

Technically, the game targets a high frame rate, which matters far more than resolution in a game this fast — and a 2D-styled game of this scope is light on hardware. Docked and handheld resolutions differ, but the art style is built on flat color and readable silhouettes rather than texture detail, so it stays sharp either way. Ink coverage reads instantly at a glance, which is a genuine feat of visual engineering when eight players are painting the same floor in two colors.

The UI is a mixed result. In-match, it’s excellent — the overhead map is legible, and the ink-percentage bar communicates the game state without you having to think about it. Out of match, the menus are over-designed. Splatsville is a hub you walk through to reach menu items that could have been menu items, and the aesthetic commitment to skeuomorphic navigation costs seconds every single time.

Nintendo exclusivity cuts both directions here.

Gyro aiming is the reason this game works on a console. Splatoon has always been the best argument in the industry for motion controls — coarse aim on the right stick, fine adjustment by tilting the console. It’s more precise than a thumbstick and, once the learning curve is behind you, competitive with a mouse for tracking. Playing Splatoon 3 with gyro off is playing a worse game, and the community knows it. If you’re new, endure the adjustment.

Handheld play is fully viable and, thanks to the three-minute match length, arguably the ideal way to consume Turf War. The trade-off is drift-prone Joy-Con sticks and the fact that gyro aiming while holding a Switch in bed is a physical comedy routine.

Then there’s the Nintendo Switch Online requirement. Online play — which is to say, the game — needs a paid subscription. It’s cheap in absolute terms and the cheapest of the three console services. It also buys you the peer-to-peer infrastructure described above, which is a difficult sentence to write without editorializing. On Switch 2, the game runs via backward compatibility; the network layer is unchanged, because the network layer was never a hardware problem.

Splatoon 3 is a very good game with a mediocre service wrapped around it, and how much that bothers you depends entirely on how long you plan to stay.

Early on, the loop is inventive, the movement is joyful, the art is arresting, and the sheer volume of stuff — four ranked modes, co-op horde, a card game, a campaign, seasonal cosmetics, community events — represents strong value at full price. Nintendo EPD understands this design space more deeply than anyone else because nobody else is working in it.

Past that point, the friction accumulates. Disconnects from matches you were winning. News broadcasts you’ve memorized. Duels you’re certain you won, with no way to know whether it was you or the connection. None of these individually is disqualifying. Together, they explain precisely why the people who love this game the most are also the ones scoring it lowest.

We recommend it — to the right audience. It’s one of the most creative competitive games of its generation, but you’re buying Nintendo’s design brilliance and Nintendo’s online infrastructure in the same box, and only one of those is world-class.