Splatoon Raiders Flips the Series on Its Head, and That's Exactly the Point

For close to ten years, Splatoon has meant one thing to most players. Competitive multiplayer. The ink fights, the four on four chaos, the ranked modes people grinded for months. That was the series. The single-player campaigns were always there, but nobody pretended they were the reason to buy. They were a tutorial at best and a short puzzle detour at worst. Something to do for an afternoon before you went back online where the real game lived.

Splatoon Raiders throws that whole setup out. It does it with enough confidence that, for a while, it feels less like a Splatoon game and more like a different series wearing the right clothes.

The solo experience is now the main event

The biggest change hits you right away. Multiplayer still exists, but it's co-op only, and it's clearly not the focus. The thing you'll sink dozens of hours into is the campaign. In the entire history of the franchise, this is the first time the solo mode isn't the side dish. It's the meal.

That's a real gamble. Nintendo is basically asking a community built on competitive screaming matches to care about a PvE loop. After spending time with the game, I think it works. The campaign is laid out as islands on a world map, and you unlock them by clearing story missions. Each mission is an arena with a bit of platforming mixed in. You can call on your squad for a boost here and there, but mostly you're moving between fights against salmonid hordes that get nastier the further you go. These aren't the dumb enemies from earlier Splatoon games. They're coordinated, they push hard, and there's enough variety to keep you from falling into one routine.

A progression system that actually hooks you

What separates Raiders from everything before it is how you grow. This is a game about building something overpowered. You grind for loot, you mess with loadouts, and you feel that rush when a build finally comes together and suddenly you're untouchable.

Your normal weapons will feel like home. Rapid fire blasters, rollers, sloshers, the usual suspects are all there. The piece that changes everything is the Gadget system. Gadgets come in three Tank types: Power, Speed, and Tactical. You pick one category per stage and slot two gadgets from that set onto your shoulder buttons.

Tactical gives you an auto turret called the Shot Pot, which is great for locking down an area. Power lets you spin up orbiting ink blobs called Splatellites that circle you and chew through enemies. At first I saved these for the hard fights. Bad instinct. The cooldowns are short and the salmonids hit like trucks, so the game basically wants you to use them constantly. Once I stopped hoarding, I was spinning that Power move every chance I got, using it as both a damage field and a shield.

That's the moment the Vampire Survivors influence clicked for me. Raiders isn't a roguelike, but it has that genre's love of exponential growth. My brain immediately went to shrinking cooldowns and stretching effect durations so the Splatellite spin was almost always up. It's the good kind of addictive.

Loot that pulls the whole thing together

Loot is the engine here. As you level up, you bump health, damage, and how many Gadget modifiers you can carry. Most of what you scoop up in stages is those modifiers, little tweaks to damage, duration, or secondary effects. Even in a short session I could see how you'd combine a normal weapon with souped up Gadgets until you felt genuinely broken in the best way.

There are Relics too. Equippable items with big perks, like a double jump. And you bring one member of the Deep Cut crew, who rides a protective machine and hands you a charged ultimate called a Showstopper. Big Man, for example, calls in a giant shark that rips across the field. All these layers pile on top of each other until you've built your perfect inkling wrecking machine.

This isn't depth for the sake of looking deep. The game keeps throwing new enemy types at you that test whether your build actually works. Salt coated salmonids are way tougher than the regular ones. Tower enemies make you chop them down to size before they're manageable. Snipers punish bad positioning. The game shuffles these pieces around so each fight stays fresh instead of repeating.

Multiplayer, but not how you remember it

The online side in Raiders is co-op only, built as raids against tougher and tougher opponents. It plays a lot like Salmon Run from Splatoon 2, except you move around the map more to find different fights, and your payout is new Gadget modifiers. The fun part is synergy. My Power build was great up close but left me squishy, so I leaned on teammates to pull aggro while I dove into the swarm. With this many build options, the co-op raids look like they could support some seriously coordinated high level play, with better loot waiting at the end as the reward.

The open question is how long it lasts. Older Splatoon games were built for competitive play that never really ends. Moving to a solo and co-op focus might mean Raiders is happy to let you beat the campaign and walk away. Whether escalating co-op raids can give it the same legs is something only time will tell. I'm hopeful, but I'm not assuming.

A different heart under the same skin

What makes Raiders feel bold is that it doesn't read like a compromise. It's not a game that bolts on single-player because the box needed a campaign bullet point. It has genuinely reimagined what Splatoon is allowed to be.

Same ink. Same look. Same characters people love. But a different center. The tight pressure of turf war gets replaced by the calm grind of tuning a build. The frantic pace of ranked matches gets replaced by the planned coordination of co-op raids. That trade will lose some longtime fans, and I get why. But it also opens the door for people who always wanted a Splatoon they could enjoy alone, without the stress of getting yelled at in voice chat.

I'm curious where this goes. Raiders has the bones of something worth caring about. A combat loop that rewards trying weird things. A loot system that doesn't waste your time. A campaign that finally treats solo play like it matters. For a series defined by its multiplayer, this is a big swerve. And honestly, it feels overdue.

Splatoon Raiders shows that even a franchise as set in its ways as this one can turn itself around. The ink is still flying. The target just moved. For a lot of us who loved the world but bounced off the competition, that's the thing we've been waiting for.

If you've skipped Splatoon because the multiplayer never clicked for you, this is the entry point you've been owed. And if you're a competitive lifer worried they ruined your game, the co-op raids are deeper than they look. Either way, Raiders is the most interesting direction the series has taken in years, and I'd rather see Nintendo take a swing like this than play it safe and stall out.