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Nintendo Made a Splatoon Looter-Shooter and the Reviews Are In

Splatoon Raiders turns Nintendo's ink shooter into a single-player looter, and six outlets came away impressed. What that spinoff actually signals is the interesting part.

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Playkora Analysis title card: Nintendo Made a Splatoon Looter-Shooter and the Reviews Are In

Splatoon Raiders, a series offshoot that reshapes Nintendo's ink shooter into a looter, went out to reviewers this week. The verdict across six outlets lands somewhere between "hectic delight" and "delightful mess", which for a first attempt at a genre is a good place to be.

What's actually new here

The headline word everyone reached for is Borderlands. Polygon called it "Nintendo's take on Borderlands," GamesRadar+ framed it as a looter shooter with Squidling vibes, and VGC went with "challenging, all-out action." So the actual news is genre, not sequel. This is Splatoon pointed at loot drops and progression rather than turf war.

Nintendo Life makes the more surprising claim in its own headline: this is the best single-player Splatoon, and it also happens to have fantastic multiplayer. A Splatoon you can meaningfully play alone is not a small pivot for a franchise built on eight people painting a floor.

The unglamorous detail worth keeping is from GamesRadar+: it's a Switch 2 title and it wants 13.1 GB. Modest, by the standards of a genre where rivals routinely ask for a spare hard drive and an apology.

Eurogamer's review sums the mood as "hectic, often overwhelming" but a delight, and the repeated caveat in the round-ups is repetition — the grind that comes free with every looter ever shipped.

Why it matters

A well-reviewed Splatoon spinoff is, on its own, a Tuesday. The reason to pay attention is what Nintendo is quietly practising here.

Looter-shooters are the genre everyone else uses to justify a live service, a season pass and a store. Nintendo has taken the mechanical skeleton of that thing — kill, loot, upgrade, repeat — and, going by the reviews, shipped it as a game with an ending you can reach playing alone. The interesting bit isn't that it borrowed from Borderlands. It's that it seems to have left the parts publishers usually keep for the monetisation team on the cutting-room floor.

That's a genuinely different bet. The mainline Splatoon games run on scheduled Splatfests and a slow drip of content; a single-player-forward loot game with strong co-op is a way to keep the brand busy between numbered entries without asking the audience to log in daily forever. If it works, expect Nintendo to treat "take a beloved multiplayer IP, make a self-contained spinoff in an adjacent genre" as a reusable move.

Be honest about the ceiling, though. Six positive reviews describing a fun, slightly repetitive spinoff is exactly what it sounds like: a good game, not a strategic earthquake. The Borderlands comparison is a reviewer's shorthand, not a mission statement, and the recurring "some repetition grates" note is the sound of the genre's oldest problem surviving contact with Nintendo. The coverage is warm. It is not claiming a new pillar of the company.

What to watch

The checkable question is whether Raiders is a one-off or a template. Two things would tell you.

First, how Nintendo talks about it after launch. A looter lives or dies on whether the studio keeps feeding it. If updates and events arrive, this becomes a platform. If it ships and goes quiet, it was an experiment, and the "repetition" line in these reviews becomes the whole story a month in.

Second, watch whether other Nintendo franchises get the same treatment. The Splatoon spinoff proving that a self-contained genre pivot can review this well is the kind of internal result that gets pointed at in meetings. If a Pikmin roguelike or a Metroid extraction thing turns up in the next year, this is where it started.

For now the practical takeaway is simpler. It's a good Switch 2 game, it's small on storage, and per VGC it is, and I quote, worth 50 squid.

Sources

Compiled from 6 publicly published sources, all linked above. Drafted and fact-checked automatically against those sources; corrections welcome — see our editorial policy.