Quick Verdict
Playing Splatoon Raiders reminded me a lot of how I felt the first time I played the original Splatoon on Wii U, a game I stood in line to try back at E3 2014 before anyone knew what Nintendo had on its hands. As someone who grew up playing shooters competitively, I fell off that horse in my early 30s as the genre got extremely competitive, and Splatoon was a real breath of fresh air that let strategy and inking the environment matter as much as racking up kills. Splatoon Raiders abandons the PvP formula entirely to focus on PvE, and somehow that gamble brought back the exact joy I felt over a decade ago.
My Switch 2 profile says I’m over 50 hours in, my character sits at level 50 plus another 42 bonus levels, and my crew has pushed to floor 112 of the endgame’s Bottomless Buffet, with roughly 20 of those hours spent grinding in co-op with friends. That’s enough time to say this confidently: Splatoon Raiders may have some rough edges, but few games have kept me this hooked in 2026. The level design is admittedly uninspiring, the soundtrack never clicked with me, and the upgrade economy is stingier than it should be, but the loot grind kept me playing long after the campaign ended. If you’re a fan of Splatoon’s gameplay at all, you’re going to love this one.
Splat’s Entertainment
The original Splatoon clicked for me in a way no shooter had in years, because while it undeniably has shooter DNA, its PvP asked for much more than aim. You could contribute to victory through strategy and inking the environment rather than solely focusing on racking up kills, and there was a lot more skill involved in how you navigated the map and managed your ink levels compared to just shooting and reloading. The game was also arguably less about precise shooting than your typical PvP shooter, which is a big part of why it landed among my favorite games on Nintendo’s platforms.
I did spend dozens of hours in both Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3, but they were PvP-centric evolutions of the formula rather than reinventions, and I never found myself as obsessed with the sequels as I was with the first game. Even Salmon Run, the co-op mode plenty of fans adore, never quite revealed its appeal to me despite putting some time into it. So when Nintendo announced the series’ first-ever spinoff as a single-player-focused game, I was curious where it would land.
Curious turned into genuinely excited by the time the dedicated Direct rolled around in June, when I said I was really looking forward to this one as someone who has loved all three Splatoon games. What surprised me was how quickly Raiders recaptured what I loved about the original Splatoon. Playing it brought back the same excitement I felt back in 2015, which is not something I expected from a PvE spinoff.
Ink Different
Before diving into what makes Splatoon Raiders special, it’s worth explaining what the game is all about if you’re new to the franchise. You play as a mechanic stranded on the mysterious Spirhalite Islands alongside Deep Cut, the idol trio from Splatoon 3, raiding stages for treasure while fending off the islands’ hostile Salmonid inhabitants. Instead of having a typical gun with bullets, your arsenal sprays or splashes ink around, and that’s how you do damage.
Splatoon Raiders has a giant collection of returning weapon classes from the other entries in the franchise, and there is definitely something that will fit your playstyle. From rapid-fire Dualies to long-range Chargers and my personal favorite, the Roller, each weapon class gives you another reason to experiment and keep farming. Every category asks you to play differently, so your weapon choice matters just as much here as it does in the mainline games.
Instead of a typical reload button, you have to dive into ink of your own color in order to refill your ink tank. When diving, you can also move much faster, assuming you’re swimming in ink of your shade, while running into the enemy’s ink slows you to a complete crawl. That constant push and pull of laying down your color before you can fight, move, or escape is the foundation everything else in the game is built on.
Tank You Very Much
The gadget system is where Raiders starts to feel meaningfully different from the mainline games. There are three tanks in the game, Power, Speed, and Tactical, and each grants access to its own respective family of gadgets. Eventually you’ll be able to equip three gadgets in total, and that’s where your loadout begins.
Depending on what you choose as your primary tank, you’ll have a secondary tank to go along with it, although those combinations are locked. Selecting the Tactical tank as your primary, for example, automatically pairs it with Power as your secondary. What that means in practice is you can equip three Tactical gadgets if you want, or two Tactical gadgets and one Power gadget.
Because your primary tank determines your secondary tank, choosing one also limits which gadgets you can combine in a single loadout. If you prefer to move around the maps a lot quicker, the Speed tank gives you access to all sorts of movement abilities, including a grappling hook style device called the Flywire, while Tactical players get tools like the Shot Pot, a deployable turret. Between the locked pairings and the gadgets themselves, your tank choice determines how you approach every single fight.
Parts and Recreation
Each gadget then has its own collection of parts, and this is where the customization really opens up. Every part occupies a certain number of slots, and each gadget has a fixed slot budget, so you’re constantly balancing how many parts you want equipped against how expensive each one is. You can fill the available slots with several cheaper utility parts or spend most of the budget on one or two stronger upgrades, and deciding between those approaches is where much of the buildcrafting comes from.
The parts loadout for each gadget is another huge way to personalize your build depending on your playstyle. Take the Shot Pot: you can outfit that turret with parts granting multi shot, shot damage up, range up, or fire rate up, turning a simple deployable into whatever your build happens to need. The combinations are plentiful, and you’ll be hunting down better tiers of each part throughout your playthrough.
Once you get the parts you want, you can further upgrade them to enhance the gadget’s damage as well as lower the part’s slot cost, which in turn frees up budget for even more parts. All of this may sound complex on paper, but it really is very straightforward in practice while still offering a good variety of builds. Nintendo found a nice middle ground here between depth and approachability.
Raid Expectations
I’ve heard Splatoon Raiders get compared to Diablo, Borderlands, and even Monster Hunter, and while those comparisons are all fitting, its core gameplay really is a horde shooter. Across its 15- to 20-hour campaign, you’ll encounter a good variety of missions, from running around maps clearing objectives to proper boss fights. One thing you shouldn’t come to Splatoon Raiders for, though, is the story. As is true of many first-party Nintendo games, it’s very light on plot, so the missions themselves carry the campaign rather than any narrative pull.
The highlights of the campaign are the Sampler Dungeons, special stages unlocked by the 24 compasses you find while exploring. Each one hands you a specific loadout and a set of challenges to clear. These are really cleverly designed because they force you to test different gadgets and learn how they actually work, triggering all these lightbulb moments about strategies you could apply in the middle of a regular battle. Think of them like the shrines in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, little puzzles and objectives to solve that teach you the game’s skills by making you use them.
While the campaign offers a good variety of levels to navigate through, the overall level design is pretty uninspiring, though in its own way, that’s fine. Splatoon is a very chaotic game by nature, and there isn’t exactly much strategy involved in ducking behind a corner to line up a shot, since your movement and placement, whether that’s in the air or under ink, is what keeps you alive. There are definitely some levels you’ll favor over others in terms of how they’re set up, but they largely don’t dictate your strategy, and you’ll mostly be flying around the map taking out the largest threats first.
All You Can Farm
Like Diablo and Monster Hunter, the real game starts after the campaign if you’re a fan of farming. Splatoon Raiders’ endgame centerpiece is the Bottomless Buffet, which puts you in small arenas where the goal is to kill as quickly as possible while picking up Power Eggs to fill a meter before time runs out. You’ll need to clear three sequential floors to earn a completion, which results in a shower of all sorts of loot, and since runs range anywhere from three to five minutes, they’re very much bite-sized farms. I kept comparing them to Diablo III Greater Rift farming or Diablo IV Pit farming, where you progress to harder and harder levels while getting upgrades along the way.
The standard character level caps at 50, but you can continue earning bonus levels afterward for very small increases to health and damage, which is how my character currently sits at level 50 plus another 42 bonus levels. Weapons carry their own progression too, with tiers ranging from one star to five stars along with the Primo prefix you’ll eventually want to chase down. A Primo weapon comes with maxed specialty stats, making it the best version of that particular weapon variant.
Five-star weapons also carry three customizable Weapon Powers that essentially serve as passives, so there’s a lot of customization you can do with weapons alone. Find the one that fits your playstyle, then further tailor it with Weapon Powers and upgrade it to max level for better damage. The Buffet just keeps on descending, with enemies growing stronger on each floor, and tuning a build well enough to push a little farther became the main reason I kept playing. It’s chaotic, repetitive fun, and for those who don’t mind this style of grind, it’s one of the best there is.
Help Wanted
Splatoon Raiders offers three different difficulty levels, so if you’re a beginner to Splatoon’s style, you’ll have a way to learn without much frustration. Best of all, whatever you choose doesn’t affect anyone who joins you in co-op, since every player gets their own settings and enemies are balanced according to each player’s level, not some magical combined number. If you’re level 8, you’re fighting level 8 enemies, your level 50 buddy fights level 50 enemies, and everyone earns their own loot, so there’s no penalty to teaming up.
The entire game is still designed to be played solo, with co-op simply making things easier thanks to extra bodies and gadgets on the map. If you get stuck playing solo, you can ask for help and up to two random players will join your mission, a system I had great success with, failing only two of the roughly dozen missions where I called for backup. There is a cooldown on the feature after each success, though, so you can’t spam it.
I personally think that cooldown is a bit of a bummer, because playing with others, even if they’re randoms, is a lot of fun. You also can’t request help in the Bottomless Buffet, so if you want company in the endgame, it’ll have to be friends you actually know. That’s exactly how I spent roughly 20 of my 50-plus hours, grinding the Buffet in co-op with friends, and those sessions are where Splatoon Raiders was at its most fun for me.
Money Well Splat
Splatoon Raiders is just another prime example of how Nintendo is still the undisputed king when it comes to sheer fun. The design may not be overly complex, and the itemization isn’t as layered as other games in the genre, even something like Borderlands, but man is it addictive and fun. I can also understand people who finish the campaign and have no desire to play more, and honestly, that’s a perfectly fine way to experience this game too.
My biggest complaint is how many resources it takes to get some of the gadgets, parts, and weapons upgraded. The grind is real, especially if you want to test different builds and combinations, and I do think the game could be more generous with what it hands out, because otherwise you’re stuck repeating some boring task over and over simply because it’s more efficient than just playing the game. Another huge negative for me was the music, which I just couldn’t connect with, and some tracks got really annoying and repetitive by the end of my 50 hours. That genuinely surprised me, because I’ve never had any issues with the music in the other Splatoon games.
At $49.99 digitally and $59.99 physically, the campaign feels fairly priced on its own, and its boss fights introduce enough new mechanics to keep the missions from blending together. Fans of Splatoon’s movement and combat should feel right at home, while the buildcrafting gives the endgame enough depth to keep the grind interesting. Now if you’ll excuse me, floor 113 and beyond are waiting.
Splatoon Raiders has an official release date of July 23, 2026, exclusively for Switch 2. This review is based on a physical copy purchased by FullCleared. While FullCleared has affiliate partnerships, these do not influence our editorial content.
Splatoon Raiders Review Gallery (possible spoilers!)
