Historically, Splatoon’s single-player campaigns have focused on acclimating you to the waters of the much more frenetic and thrilling multiplayer combat modes. Splatoon 3’s campaign — called The Return of the Mammalians — begins in territory so familiar that I was initially worried that I was going to spend the next several hours taking tutorials on basics I’d learned two games ago. Fortunately, the rug was quickly pulled out from under me, leading to a brand new take on the series’ central world design combined with some of the best ideas from Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion. my own path to any of its 70 inventive quests and choose where to go next when exploring its murky world. Many of the enemies I encountered there were unchanged from previous Splatoons, but I had a great time navigating the wide variety of objectives until the campaign’s explosively satisfying finale. While Splatoon 3 does its best to push you in the direction of multiplayer Turf Wars once you’ve customized your character, I found the single-player campaign to be worth it. During its admittedly slow intro, you’ll be introduced to a strange murky flow that blocks your linear path, something only your silly little fish can devour – if you’ve got enough salmon egg coin to motivate it. The ooze bears a striking resemblance to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s toxic blight, and touching any material will cause death by fuzzball. Once you get to the real meat of the campaign in the frozen world of Alterna’s hub and its six islands (which thankfully doesn’t take long), you’ll find goop pretty much everywhere as you search for a lost companion. Fortunately, the paths I blazed through the deadly slime were long enough that I wasn’t constantly dying, and the gaps in the goo layer gave glimpses of new paths I could blaze in the future. This fuzzy flow serves not only as a barrier, but also as a series of open-ended options for how you want to proceed. If your little friend swallows a ball, it can unlock anything from shortcuts to hidden collectibles and or possibly open a path to a kettle that takes you to a mission or a pipe that leads to the next island. You can usually get a good idea of what’s on the other side by using some perspective panels and checking how much currency it costs to remove the goop. Several times I found myself weighing the odds of spending all of my salmon eggs (Splatoon 3’s primary form of currency) to open a path to the next island, or trying to uncover more of the current area to find items needed to upgrade my skills. While the quests themselves are purely task-focused, completing each one will help you uncover interesting tidbits about the larger mystery behind these frozen ruins, and even some very fascinating revelations about how this humanoid-dominated world came to be. squids. I appreciated Splatoon’s continued commitment to keeping its levels focused on challenges, while still offering compelling bits of lore and history in the hub world for those willing to seek them out. Meanwhile, the more urgent story of your rescue mission is fleshed out by some welcome familiar faces when you first arrive in Alterna, and smartly expanded as you encounter a trio of bosses while searching for your missing friend.
What we said about Splatoon 2
There’s a lot to love about Nintendo’s second iteration of its quirky shooter, especially the way Splatoon 2 emphasizes splattering the ground as much as inking your opponents. The new additions to the single-player campaign and multiplayer modes are a step in the right direction, but it still has some work to do to make participating in online games and voice chat less annoying. However, with an addictive new Salmon Run co-op mode and the promise of free updates like the ones that helped make the original Splatoon its own, I expect Splatoon 2 to keep me hooked. – Brendan Graeber, July 24, 2017
Rating: 8.3
Read our full Splatoon 2 review While you’ll need to complete a certain number of missions to get a good chunk of stream removal currency, how and where you decide to do it is entirely up to you because there’s no mission that’s mandatory. It’s a risky move to create so many missions and then let you skip them entirely, but I really got how Splatoon 3 respected my time and preferences — if I wanted to accumulate some currency by clearing a few missions for the beeline to the next island straight into a boss fight, I was more than welcome to take this approach. Whether you’re just there to compete in the finale or want to take the time to scale every location and complete every mission, this campaign doesn’t judge. I managed to complete the main story in about four to five hours, skipping an island almost entirely and skipping several other missions. However, there was much more to come later: it took me a few more hours to go back and complete every mission and investigate every location on the island — about eight hours in total. There are many reasons to stick around and explore the arctic world of Spatoon 3. First, the intriguing ruins of a lost human civilization covered in deadly goo hide all sorts of collectibles. In addition to the usual delivery, you can also find rewards that benefit you in both single player and multiplayer: from items that unlock upgrade levels to cosmetics to decorate your locker in the multiplayer lobby, even increases in xp and money for use in competitions. There are plenty of reasons to stick around and explore the arctic world of Spatoon 3. “ Many of these secrets are buried in the snow, requiring your little friend’s keen nose to track them down. It’s not exactly the brightest bioluminescent fish in the sea, and sometimes it took repeated passes to get it to rush to show buried treasure, but it was so charming to watch Smallfry climb and accidentally fall off cliffs that I forgave him. He also has his uses in the missions themselves, acting as part distraction, part grenade – but I rarely found a situation where throwing him into battle was preferable to just diving in and splattering enemies myself. No matter how many Hero Gear skills I bought to increase his health and damage and reduce his cooldowns and ink usage, he never became that useful outside of very specific missions. (Why would I want to upgrade his health if I’ve never seen enemies actually hurt him?) I ended up focusing on more obvious upgrades like better weapon spread and ink capacity for myself, and became much more efficient at taking out the enemies than he was. If you loved Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion and its approach to mission structure, you’ll love it. While Splatoon 3 still doesn’t want to completely let go of your hand through constant chatter from your squids about what to do next, the missions themselves are almost always full of fun ideas that also provide some good lessons to be learned. with you. multiplayer matches. Most will give you a few choices in different weapons, and I liked that even simple targets provided opportunities to get a feel for weapon types that I probably wouldn’t unlock in multiplayer for a while. Later levels even allow you to try out more specialized variations to better understand and appreciate the details of a weapon’s rate of fire, ink consumption, and the ground a shot can cover. I was excited to try out more advanced weapons like the explosive launch bucket or the all-new splatana, which is lined with prints along its ink-spewing “blade” and can be charged up to look like a chainsaw sword. Using these ink-spewing weapons ultimately influenced which weapons I chose to buy first after spending some time in multiplayer modes. Some weirder missions also rely on showing off the power of Splatoon 3’s new special abilities, allowing you to play around with them freely with unlimited uses. Being able to zip between pillars like Spider-Man and smash to ambush enemies using the Zipcaster was incredible and gave me a fun environment to realize the potential of how it could be used in multiplayer. Even though it was rarely a one-on-one comparison of fighting other players online, this single player campaign did a great job of preparing me for basic concepts. Things like ink management, understanding weapon spread, and even using one of Splatoon 3’s two new move options – the Squid Surge – to quickly climb walls and drop targets after blasting upwards. I only wish he had taken some time to introduce the other new ability – the Squid Roll – and how to use it to effectively and quickly avoid danger by jumping in another direction without losing momentum. This single player campaign did a great job of preparing me for basic concepts. “ Each area has a few “main, but still optional” quests found in cauldrons of gold, and these lead you to fairly standard objectives, such as fighting enemies and platforming through inky terrain to reach your goal. Meanwhile, dozens of black kettles provide more interesting and often challenging objectives, but will charge you a small fee to access (and try again if you fail). Even the fanciest objectives can teach you how to properly split your time between inky terrain and enemies – like a race on rapidly falling platforms or following the narrow ink paths created by bouncing bombs through deadly enemy ink , which require fast and accurate shots. One of my favorites involved a maze straight out of Pac-Man – I…
