Splatoon – Nintendo’s take on shooting games – is as wonderfully, vibrantly creative as the phrase “Nintendo’s take on shooting games” might suggest. An entirely unique central mechanic removes the usual assault-rifle-toting grunts in favour of shape-shifting squids with a guns full of ink. Your aim is to paint the environment with as much of your team’s colour as possible, taking out rival players as you go.
At any point, if you look down at your Game Pad controller, you can see the world being slowly covered with lurid ink, like an animated Jackson Pollock painting, giving you an indication of both score and movement. At the end of each fiercely contested, inky tug-of-war, a chubby cat announces the score as a percentage, tallying up the two with a slow build and a sudden reveal.
The controls and basic concept are familiar – grab a weapon, fire it in the general direction of the other team until you win – but the visual style and the underlying systems are new. Splatoon’s fashion sense is straight out of a day-glo, sport-punk future influenced by Nickelodeon and energy drinks, a faux-Tokyo street look with a cleverly designed nonsense font that teeters on the legible, and the obvious overtones of Super Mario Sunshine’s harbour level. The result is something that’s so cohesive and instantly recognisable in its ingredients yet utterly new as a whole – and that’s just how it plays, too.
In true Nintendo style, none of it is meaningless set-dressing: the clothes and weapons, as silly and odd as they are (ranging from your standard-issue squirt gun to more left-field choices, such as the paint roller) provide stat buffs and special abilities. The bright colours serve to both detach Splatoon from its staid, solemn shooter brethren and to tie it into the 90s cartoon aesthetic it longs for. Meanwhile, your character can switch from human form into a squid, which enables you to swim invisibly through the sea of ink; the gorgeous fluid animations conjure up memories of washed-up celebs being gunked on children’s TV.
It’s all there for a reason, and everything works in harmony to make a pretty solid shooter from a company that prefers to dabble in plumbers and princesses. But if you lie down with dogs, you’ll wake up with fleas – and the online shooter genre can be a mangy cur at times. Splatoon suffers from some fairly irritating teething problems, the sorts of things genre veterans like Call of Duty and Halo nailed down years ago.
Sometimes the lobby waits between matches can be interminably long, and you can’t get out once you’re committed. Also, the skill weighting makes it difficult for new (and not very good) players to reach the ranks of the rest – gaining XP is based on how well you perform in a match, so if you’re in a side with higher-ranking players who pack better weapons and kit, you’ll struggle. Furthermore, a shortage of maps makes matches dull and repetitive after a while, not to mention difficult because of all the smart-arses who have them memorised. Most annoyingly, it won’t be possible to play in private parties or join games as a team until a patch in August; and though the choice not to add in voice-chat is an understandable one for a company so focused on the younger demographic, it makes clever co-op a near impossibility.
But there’s still plenty to love. The entire concept of a shooter where painting the map purple is more important than taking out enemies is all at once sweet, clever and funny, and if the online shooter elements fill you with game rage, you can always decompress with the puzzle-filled solo story mode, which pits you against some shady sealife in a few rather more exciting maps than the co-op fare. The game’s aesthetic is gorgeous, well-designed and fresh, and the funky music, sung entirely in squid-squeaks, is catchy to the point where you may find yourself ostracised at work or on public transport because you’re making weird yet tuneful squid noises to the music in your head.
It would be short-sighted to criticise the first game in a long time that’s really attempted to revitalise and reinvent a genre that often seems stagnant. This sort of daring creative venture will have its flaws, and if anything, we should be glad that it’s Nintendo taking the first step into new territory. Splatoon is unlike anything we’ve seen – a kaleidoscopic combo of Doom, Jet Set Radio and cult Wii painting game de Blob. Alongside the likes of Bayonetta 2, Mario Kart 8 and Super Smash Bros it gives the Wii U console significant clout in areas of the gaming spectrum now dominated by Microsoft and Sony machines.
On its own, Splatoon is a lovely, exciting and most importantly, different shooter. Is it the perfect shooter for people who don’t like shooters that some were hoping for? Not quite. People who are terrible at Call of Duty will probably still be terrible at this game – and for those players, the experience occasionally suffers as a result. But it would be ridiculous to miss out on this just because you can’t fire straight to save your life.
Splatoon is a breath of fresh air – or more accurately “splodge of fresh ink” – for those who like to shoot stuff, but have grown tired of the endless bloody churn of gritty, realistic shooters. It is the coolest game on the market.
Nintendo; Wii U; £30; Pegi rating: 7+
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