Nintendo’s squid shooter holds up, nine years on

Nintendo had a good problem in 2017: prove the ink didn’t just splash once. Splatoon arrived in 2015 as a gamble, a shooter where the goal was coverage rather than kills, and it worked. Splatoon 2 arrived on the Nintendo Switch on July 21, 2017, as the direct sequel, developed and published by Nintendo and built by its EPD Production Group No. 5. It is a third-person shooter about humanoid cephalopods, and it is very nearly the sequel the first game deserved.

Trailer, via Nintendo of America.

Two Years After the Final Splatfest

Splatoon 2 takes place roughly two years after the events of Splatoon, a gap the team chose to make the world feel more real. The setting is Inkopolis Square, on a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity is millennia gone and marine life evolved to take its place.

The single-player campaign, Octo Canyon, opens with a theft. The Great Zapfish that powers the city has vanished, and so has Callie of the Squid Sisters. Cap’n Cuttlefish and Agent 3 are elsewhere. Marie, Callie’s cousin and the other half of the duo, takes up her role as Agent 2 of the Squidbeak Splatoon and recruits an Inkling from Inkopolis Square to become Agent 4.

That recruit fights through Octo Canyon with Marie and weapons expert Sheldon, recovering stolen Zapfish along the way. The turn is that Callie has sided with the Octarians, brainwashed by their leader DJ Octavio, who is using the Great Zapfish to power his DJ stage, the Octobot King. Marie frees Callie from the mind control. The Squid Sisters reunite and go back to making music.

Rollers, Dualies and the Special Gauge

The combat loop is unchanged in its bones and sharper in its hands. Players alternate between a humanoid form, where they walk and fire ink, and a squid form, where they swim through their own color to move fast and refill. Matches are won by painting the map, not by racking up kills.

Each loadout pairs a main weapon with one sub weapon and one special. Subs cost a heavy amount of ink and tend toward defensive structures or offensive projectiles. Specials charge through the Special Gauge by inking the ground around you. Cosmetic gear carries abilities, including faster swimming in your own ink and a bigger ink tank.

Nine classes of main weapon are available, seven returning from Splatoon: Shooters, Blasters, Rollers, Brushes, Chargers, Sloshers and Splatlings. Splatoon 2 adds Dualies, dual-wielded weapons that let the player dodge-roll. That single addition changes how a fight reads. A Dualie player can commit, slip sideways and commit again, and the class gives the game a mobility option the first entry never had.

Octo Expansion and the Deepsea Metro

The Octo Expansion arrived as downloadable content on June 16, 2018, and it is the best thing attached to Splatoon 2. It runs roughly alongside Octo Canyon and drops an amnesiac Octoling, Agent 8, into the Deepsea Metro, a subterranean train station.

A talking telephone gives the orders. Cap’n Cuttlefish, trapped alongside Agent 8, helps. The goal is to reach the surface by clearing testing facilities across the Metro and collecting four objects called “thangs.” Finish the story and you can play as an Octoling in multiplayer.

That last reward matters more than it sounds. It turns a campaign into a permanent change to how the game looks and who players get to be.

What Held Up, What Didn’t

Development began shortly after Splatoon’s free content updates wrapped in October 2015. The stated aim was a worthy sequel with new weapons and mechanical changes to separate it from the first game. On that measure, Splatoon 2 mostly delivers. The graphics are cleaner, the returning systems are refined, and Dualies plus the Octo Expansion give it an identity of its own.

The criticism lands too. Online matchmaking drew complaints, and voice chat, which required the Nintendo Switch Online app, was widely disliked. Those are not small things for a game that lives online.

Here is the schedule as it actually played out:

The numbers back the case. As of December 31, 2022, Splatoon 2 had sold over 13.6 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling games on the Switch. Splatoon 3 followed on September 9, 2022.

Our read: Splatoon 2 is a refinement first and a reinvention second, and that is fine. The Octo Expansion is the argument for it — a tighter, stranger campaign that the base game’s Octo Canyon does not quite match. The matchmaking and voice chat problems are real, but they are the kind of friction that ages out of a game’s reputation while the core loop keeps pulling players back.

The ink still works. Score: 8.2 of 10.

game review · Nintendo · Nintendo Switch · Octo Expansion · Splatoon 2 · third-person shooter