Splatoon Raiders is one of my favourite Nintendo games in years

Splatoon is always a series I wanted to love but never fully got into.

With MobileSyrup‘s former editor-in-chief Patrick O’Rourke largely covering earlier entries, I came into them later. And while I always appreciated the series’ originality and lovable quirks, I just never stuck with them. That’s always been one of the inherent problems with competitive multiplayer games for me — jumping on later after everyone has mastered the game feels like you missed the boat. They’re usually just not my jam.

But Splatoon Raiders is different. While previous Splatoon games have had some single-player content, Raiders is focused entirely around this, immediately giving it a different feel. What’s more, it adopts a fascinating “looter shooter” action-RPG framework, making it stand out even more from its predecessors. Ultimately, that gameplay loop has really spoken to me, making Splatoon Raiders my most enjoyable Switch 2 game since last year’s Donkey Kong Bananza.

Above all else, Splatoon Raiders is the game that keeps on giving. Sure, the story is predictably light, focusing on your customizable character, The Mechanic, as they work together with music group Deep Cut (returning from Splatoon 3) to explore Salmonid-filled islands for valuables. But really, it’s just a silly excuse for Raiders‘ treasure hunting premise, which is where the game truly comes alive.

From your makeshift home base, you’ll venture out on Raids in various destinations, from large mountainous islands to sweltering, tight caverns. The overall goal is always to clear the stage to receive treasure, but different objectives will spring up to get you there. In one Raid, you might have to simply make it to the end and defeat a miniboss, while others involve light platforming or intense Horde Mode-style skirmishes.

What makes this so fun, though, is the sheer variety and depth of loot. Besides your base assortment of inky weapons that serve as both guns and tools to paint the environment over Salmonids’ hazardous goo, you can equip one of three tanks — Speed, Power, and Tactical — that carry their own secondary abilities that operate on cooldowns. Power is self-explanatory, while Tactical tanks focus on abilities that help you with crowd control, like summoning eight orbiting discs that push enemies away. Speed, on the other hand, encourages faster and smoother navigation.

The Speed-based Blast Boot quickly became my favourite, allowing me leap and somersault forward a sizeable distance to come crashing down for heavy area-of-effect damage. Not only did it help me damage clusters of enemies, but it let me quickly escape any hordes that were surrounding me. And because pretty much everything in Raiders has its own progression system, you can eventually level up your Speed Tank to unlock passive abilities like Tank Torrent, which grants me increased movement and swim speed plus a little ink-generating, enemy-repelling aura after being submerged in ink for a few seconds.

What’s more, you can upgrade your hideout to add a station that lets you create additional mods for your Tank abilities, like enhanced knockback or a faster jump. You even have a little Bot Buddy that helps you fight and whom you can command to drill into resource wells, tee you up for huge leap to reach other areas or even aerial enemies and execute super moves once a bar is filled.

This creates a constantly exciting gameplay loop wherein I would frequently experiment with various weapons, tank types and perks to find my favourite loadouts. And because Raids graciously tend to be only several minutes long at most, there’s this persistent just one more feeling to them. There’s an irresistible allure of potentially getting higher level dual-wielding pistols, currency that I could use to improve my existing burst rifle, materials that can upgrade my base or even just skill points to boost stats like HP or damage output. It retains everything that’s great about Splatoon but brings it into a single-player experience whose pace, flow and challenge I can control.

And to that point, there is some smart co-op multiplayer support if you so choose. Up to four people can take part in Raids, and difficulty will be adjusted accordingly, depending on each person’s individual level. Besides starting your own parties with friends, there are options to request help on a specific Raid or even offer support to others. The former “Call for Help” option is limited to once every 30 minutes so you can’t spam it, while “Go Help” can be used at any time, with bonus loot being rewarded once a day for the latter.

I played a few matches pre-release with Nintendo Treehouse and some other journalists, and found it shook up the flow of Raids quite beautifully. On the one hand, you have to share from a wider pool of lives, which encourages close collaboration. And in some of the stages, especially claustrophobic underground caverns filled with wormlike creatures with weakpoints on their rear, having a squad that divides and conquers can make all the difference. All of this affords Raiders a most welcome drop-in, drop-out feeling that can avoid the sense of grinding that can sometimes plague these sorts of games for me; if you’re ever having trouble on a particularly high-level Raid, you can simply squad up with others.

Because man, some of the Raids can get intense. With hordes of wacky Salmonid enemy types that range from armoured eels to flying saucer-like fish, you can sometimes feel overwhelmed, especially in stages where you have to defeat enough of them to charge your Bot Buddy’s drill to progress. It’s gloriously chaotic thanks to this captivating rhythm of running around, shooting Salmonids, swimming away to avoid both hordes and enemy ink and perfectly timing my cooldown-operated abilities. And because every Raid, even failed ones, reward me plenty of loot, I was always eager to take on more.

Easy to pick up and deceptively deep once you dive in, Splatoon Raiders is the full package. While the story is disposable, the constant sense of progression, from new and upgradable gear to resources to overhaul my ever-growing hideout, is simply outstanding. All of that makes Splatoon Raiders not only of my top Switch 2 games, but a favourite of 2026 so far in general.

Splatoon Raiders is now available on Nintendo Switch 2.