Nintendo keeps making shooters more friendly and approachable

Nintendo does a lot of weird things, but Splatoon might just be one of the strangest — or at least the boldest. The series started as an attempt to muscle into the ultra-competitive online shooter space, but in a way that feels a world away from the violence and bombast of Call of Duty or Battlefield. Splatoon is essentially candy-coated paintball starring a race of skate punk squid creatures, and across three entries Nintendo has just about perfected the formula. The series introduced the idea of competitive shooters to whole new audiences, and now it’s expanding: Splatoon Raiders takes it in a different direction, but with the same focus on making shooters more approachable. Nintendo keeps making shooters more friendly and approachable Splatoon Raiders swaps competitive online play for a fresh take on looter shooters that you can play solo. Splatoon Raiders swaps competitive online play for a fresh take on looter shooters that you can play solo. As opposed to past entries, which primarily revolved around team-based competitive matches, Raiders is what’s known as a looter shooter. Think games like Destiny or Borderlands where you take on missions and explore dungeons in order to earn new gear and skills, which in turn let you take on more challenging missions and dungeons. It’s a genre where repetition is inherent in the premise as you replay levels over and over again in search of the best loot. This means that the moment-to-moment experience — how fun the weapons are to use, how interesting the levels are to explore, how much incentive there is to get new gear to play around with — has to be enjoyable enough to encourage those replays. And that’s exactly where Splatoon excels. In terms of how it plays, Raiders is nearly identical to its predecessors. You still control a squid-like kid that can wield various weapons, ranging from guns that look like Super Soakers to gigantic paint rollers. Splatoon’s defining characteristic is ink: It’s what you shoot at enemies, but you can also transform from a humanoid into a squid in order to swim through it. Immersing yourself in ink lets you move more quickly through a level, replenish your health, and refill your ammo supply. The result is shooter action where you’re constantly moving, because standing still means death (or, in the parlance of Splatoon, getting splatted). That all remains true in Raiders. But here you’re using those skills while traveling to various levels in order to defeat enemies and find treasure. The story has you playing the role of a mechanic aboard a craft that crash-lands on a mysterious chain of islands. Unable to leave, you and your fellow crew — which consists of members of the in-universe Splatoon pop group Deep Cut — set about building a rickety base and then exploring the islands in search of treasure and, hopefully, a way home. Like most looter shooters, the gameplay cycle works like this: You gear up at base, head into a level, return home with some improved loot, and th…