Splatoon for Nintendo Wii U came out today, and I picked it up and gave it a try. If you don’t know, it’s a third-person shooter where you play as characters known as inklings; they have a human-like form and a squid form. Two teams of four players each shoot ink around a level, trying to cover as much ground as possible with their color of ink. The players can also kill (or “splat”) players of the opposing team. There’s also a mission-based one-player mode.
The game starts out with a tutorial, where you have to shoot balloons as you learn the basic controls. The first thing I noticed is that the game uses motion controls by default. You move the gamepad up and down to aim your weapon. I’m not a fan of motion controls, so I wanted to disable that ASAP. I also wanted to change the horizontal direction of the camera stick, but I couldn’t access the settings until after I completed the tutorial. You can then adjust your settings in the plaza, but you’re not holding your weapon there, so that’s not extremely useful. The only place you can adjust the settings while you’re holding a weapon is in the weapons shop. The entire settings menu disappears when in gameplay areas such as Octo Valley; I really wish the settings were more accessible.
Once I made my initial changes to the settings, I tried out the one-player mode. Here, the focus is on defeating enemies and overcoming obstacles. There are also some platforming elements, even though your character isn’t much of a jumper. In some areas, you’ll need to find a key to unlock a launchpad that takes you to a new area. There are also bosses to fight. Your weapons use ink as ammo, and it gradually runs out as you shoot. To reload, you need to press ZL to change into squid form while standing in ink of your own color. You can also swim while in squid form, allowing you to move around quickly–but again, only through ink of your own color. I played about four or five levels of this mode, and I had a good time.
I then decided to try out the online battles. Each time you start, you have to wait for a total of eight players to be added to the game. You are assigned to teams of four, and you have to spread your ink across as much of the level as you can. It was honestly quite frustrating at first, because you only have the basic gun and you’re playing against players who use giant rollers, big bombs, and other advanced weapons. They can kill you in one hit, and it’s hard to make much progress until you’ve leveled up at least a few times and purchased new weapons and other upgrades. Heck, even after I upgraded my weapon, I was still getting killed far more often than I was killing other people.
Even though victory or defeat is decided by the amount of ink on the ground, some players will focus on taking you out–so you have to keep on your toes. Even after a dozen online battles or so, I’m still pretty bad at it. I need to learn how to use the special weapons more effectively, and I need to start paying attention to the gamepad. It shows a map of the level, complete with the current ink coverage. It’s hard to take your eyes off of the action, but it seems to be a necessity to get good at the game.
One other thing I want to mention is the shop. It allows you to buy new weapons and clothing items to customize your character. For example, you can buy new shirts and shoes that give you new abilities. An item may increase your defense, give your bombs a larger range, or allow you to swim through ink faster. But you can only access the shop once you’ve reached level 4…and it seems that the only way to increase your level is to play online battles. So you may want to keep that in mind before buying the game if you don’t plan on playing online (or if you don’t have a decent internet connection). Nintendo is preventing offline players from fully customizing their characters, which seems a bit harsh if you ask me.
Overall, I had a very good time on my first evening with Splatoon. The one-player missions are pretty fun, and the online battles are particularly enjoyable. Even when I lose over and over, I keep wanting to come back for more. I’m actually enjoying the game more than I thought I would. So it definitely gets a thumbs-up so far.
In case you’re interested, here is a picture of the game disc.
And here is gameplay video of an online turf war battle: (view on Youtube)