I’ve been playing a metric ton of Switch 2 exclusive Splatoon Raiders this past week and I’m now convinced of two particular things: 1) This could be my favorite Switch 2 release so far and 2) Splatoon Raiders might actually be a horror game about fish.
I had the pleasure of making my way through Splatoon 3 just prior to jumping into Nintendo’s new looter shooter spinoff, and it has helped me contextualize where the inky series has been and where it’s going before the inevitable Splatoon 4.
In addition to plenty of competitive multiplayer, Splatoon 3 contains a decent little single-player campaign, wherein you explore a world called Alterna that’s polluted with fuzzy purple ooze. You’re of course tasked with cleaning up the mess, and you do this by completing singular challenge missions, defeating bosses and snatching up collectibles while upgrading your abilities and gear. There’s also the co-op Salmon Run mode to conquer, and this is where Splatoon Raiders picks up the cephalopod baton.
Raiders removes competitive multiplayer entirely, evolves the aforementioned Salmon Run exponentially and creates an entirely separate solo game out of the cobbled-together pieces. The basic setup is that you, the personality-devoid Mechanic, is sent to the spooky Spirhalite Islands alongside returning characters Big Man, Shiver and Frye, to mine treasure to help alleviate Splatsville’s ballooning debt problem. You’re tasked with raiding numerous islands and dispatching the mutated zombie Salmonids that live there, and these things look truly grotesque…in the best possible way.
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I mean, if you’ve ever seen an adult salmon in real life, you’ll know they aren’t exactly the most aesthetically pleasing aquatic lifeforms. Splatoon Raiders amps this up by metastasizing the enemy designs out in dozens of terrifying directions, and the end result is deliciously horrific. Add to this the discordant Hereditary-inspired soundtrack and a muted color palette that utterly shirks the inviting rainbow of chaos that is Splatoon 3, and you’ve got what we might call a cute survival horror game. One that’s rated E for Everyone, naturally.
There’s a whole Salmonid lore to explore here, with briny scrolls and ancient found relics hinting at a lost city of fishy Atlantis. Admittedly, the main story in Raiders is serviceably okay, but like with Splatoon 3, I desperately wanted voice-acting throughout, and it’s missing. Having characters talk only via text is fine for me in longer adventures like traditional RPGs, but in punchy action games, I yearn for vocal vitality in the dialogue and interactions.
So what are you doing in Splatoon Raiders that makes it possibly my favorite Switch 2 game to date? Well, the whole ordeal is deceptively simple. You have a floating shantytown homebase at sea, and it’s from here that you not only launch into various raids across the islands to gather Salmonid eggs, ocean trash trinkets and shards, but also upgrade your gear, change your outfits and tweak your builds. Battles are intense and encourage that you keep moving as you smartly utilize everything in your growing bag of tricks. The difficulty always seems ‘just enough’ and the chaos scales nicely with your increasing skills.
By their own words, the developers have infused the game with a ‘pleasant busyness’ that keeps you slowly rewarded and neurotically driven to achieve more, more, more. We’re definitely being manipulated, not unlike the hedonic treadmill of actual existence, but boy does it feel fantastic. We’re inside the inky matrix, friends.
By the end of the game, however, I found the customization of the ocean base itself to be rather lacking, and I wanted much more in the way of decorations and such. Not enough cool outfits for your Inkling, either, now that I think about it. Your arsenal is neat, though, as its made of repurposed garbage like old condiment and soda bottles.
So, back to the sticky gameplay loop: You jump into endless raids from your buoyant shantytown, and these comprise of different flavors of missions. Some have you hunting down smaller Spirhalite crystals to mine before a giant central crystal is unlocked for collection. Others see you digging deeper and deeper into the island’s core as you battle waves of angry Salmonids against a timer. Then there’s sampler dungeons that challenge you with gadgets and platforming.
They’re all fun to complete, but I will say that I’m not a huge fan of the level design in Splatoon Raiders. It feels somewhat uninspired, and the previously mentioned lack of color and visual pizazz (while spooky) doesn’t make for any sort of memorable eye-candy. This becomes especially apparent in longer levels that encourage you to explore. The world comes across as dead and hollow, which again gives Raiders those classic horror vibes, if perhaps unintentionally so.
As you come back from raids, you can upgrade literally everything, and even scrap weapons for parts later on. This is where Raiders’ addictive loop really kicks in. Even if you fail a raid, you’ll still earn experience, and that makes the dopamine go BOOM. Your build in Raiders is developed around three distinct ink tanks with their own special gadgets: Speed, Power and Tactical. I ended being partial to the Power tank with its Meteor Mitt and Splatchett gadgets, but truthfully, they’re all enjoyable to master. Gadgets can be outfitted with increasingly powerful gadget parts, and all of this can be mixed and matched as you hop in and out of missions.
Weapons ended up feeling a bit disposable, I’d say. Even though you can level them up five separate times before they max out, there’s always a better one coming down the pipeline, and I would have preferred a way to keep my favorites longer term without being tempted to scrap them. I guess that’s part of the looter shooter grind. That’s the way game chasin’ go.
The Switch 2 hardware really shines in Splatoon Raiders, if only to showcase how many Salmonids can appear on-screen at any given moment. I did experience stuttering a few select times, mostly during story cutscenes, but during regular gameplay, it was mostly a solid upscaled 4K/60fps in docked mode. In terms of raw Switch 2 performance, Raiders looks pretty similar to the legacy Switch Splatoon 3, which got a 4K/60fps patch last year. The Switch 2 Pro Controller shines here, too, even without motion control turned on.
After you finish Splatoon Raiders, there’s a whole challenging endgame to explore, with older raids getting upgraded into Spicy and Super Spicy renditions. It’s so, so fun to play, and despite the lackluster level design, I keep coming back for more, and I’m now jumping into other gamers’ raids to help out online. I do hope Nintendo gives us DLC at some point.
Addictive, easy to learn, difficult to master, Splatoon Raiders scratches that looter shooter itch, and even provides some surprising survival horror vibes along the way. It’s only brought down by some uninteresting environments, middling aesthetic customization and a dearth of voice-acting. A solid spin-off to the Splatoon IP that I’ll be playing for months to come, no doubt.
Platform: Switch 2
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: July 23, 2026
Price: $49.99 (digital), $59.99 (physical)
Score: 8.5/10
Disclosure: Nintendo provided a review code for coverage purposes.
