TL;DR – Splatoon Raiders Review at a Glance
- Developer / Publisher: Nintendo EPD / Nintendo
- Platform: Nintendo Switch 2 (exclusive)
- Genre: Third-person shooter / Action RPG / Looter shooter
- Release Date: July 23, 2026
- Price: $49.99 digital | $59.99 physical
- Metacritic / OpenCritic: 81 / 83
- Best for: Solo players and co-op squads who want deep build-crafting in a vibrant Splatoon world
- Skip if: You’re here purely for competitive Turf War – it’s nowhere to be found
- Our Score: 8.5 / 10
Nintendo doesn’t do spin-offs lightly, and Splatoon Raiders is proof of that. The first proper side entry in the Splatoon franchise ditches competitive multiplayer almost entirely, swapping Turf War lobbies for a loot-driven single-player adventure across a brand-new archipelago. The result is one of the most surprising and rewarding Nintendo Switch 2 exclusives yet – a game that borrows the ink-soaked DNA of its predecessors and builds something fresh around it. Whether you’re a die-hard Splatoon fan or someone who always admired the series from afar but couldn’t stomach ranked matches, Raiders is the game the franchise has been quietly building toward.
What is Splatoon Raiders?
Splatoon Raiders is a single-player-focused spin-off developed by Nintendo EPD and released exclusively for Nintendo Switch 2 on July 23, 2026. You play as a customisable Inkling or Octoling character called the Mechanic, who joins beloved idol trio Deep Cut – Shiver, Frye, and Big Man from Splatoon 3 – on a treasure-hunting expedition to the mysterious Spirhalite Islands. During the opening flight, something goes wrong, a beam of light tears out of the island’s core, a cyclone swallows the helicopter, and the group crash-lands on a remote outcrop with no way home. From there, your job is to explore, raid, loot, and fight your way to the centre of the mystery while keeping Deep Cut alive and in good spirits.
It’s also worth flagging for co-op fans: while Raiders is primarily a solo experience, it supports up to four players both locally and online, with difficulty scaling depending on how many raiders are in your squad.
Story and Setting – Spirhalite Islands Explored
The Spirhalite Islands are a major aesthetic departure from the urban neon of Inkopolis and Splatsville. These are wild, ancient, overgrown archipelago zones packed with hidden caves, crumbling ruins, and colossal Salmonid enemies lurking behind every crystal formation. Nintendo leans hard into the sense of mystery here, and it works.
You and Deep Cut set up a Hideout Ship as your base of operations, which doubles as your gear management hub between raids. The story unfolds through animated cutscenes – more of them than any previous Splatoon game – which give the narrative a cinematic punch the series has never quite had before. Shiver, Frye, and Big Man are as chaotic and entertaining as ever, and spending time with them between missions is genuinely one of the highlights of the whole experience.
The story itself isn’t the deepest Nintendo has ever penned. The mystery of why the islands are crawling with hostile Salmonids and what’s causing the central beam of light takes its time to pay off, and the dialogue occasionally runs heavy-handed. But as a framework for getting you to dive into the next raid? It does its job well, and the final act delivers the kind of big-swing boss moments Splatoon fans will remember.
Gameplay Loop – Raids, Loot, and Build-Crafting
The core of Splatoon Raiders is a raid-based loop you’ll find hard to put down. Before heading out, you load your loadout at the Hideout Ship: choosing a weapon from a pool of over 100 options spread across multiple rarity tiers, selecting your Ink Tank class, slotting in Gadgets and Relic Powers, and picking a Bot Buddy Deep Cut member to accompany you. That Bot Buddy isn’t just window dressing – they actively fight alongside you, and learning to bounce off their head for aerial positioning or power them up for a special attack adds real tactical texture to combat.
There are three main stage types across the Spirhalite Islands. Exploration stages let you move freely through a level, hunting down large blue crystals and clearing the Salmonid enemies guarding them before excavating Spirhalite Shards with a drill. Hidden Trial stages, unlocked by finding compasses in other stages, function like Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s Shrines – self-contained challenges with preset gadgets where you have to reach a goal. Then there are the story missions, which are the best the game has to offer, and where the boss fights pull out their most creative tricks.
Critically, your loadout is locked once you enter a raid. Any weapons or gear that drop from enemies mid-raid can’t be equipped until you return to base. It’s a deliberate design choice that forces you to commit to your build and think carefully before heading out – but it can sting when a god-roll weapon drops and you have to wait to see it properly. A minor gripe, but one you’ll feel across a long session.
Ink Tanks – The Class System That Changes Everything
One of Raiders’ biggest departures from the mainline series is its Ink Tank system, which functions as the game’s class mechanic. There are three tanks to choose from:
- Speed Tank – Built around mobility, ranged attacks, and getting around the battlefield quickly.
- Power Tank – Maximum ink output and raw damage, built for players who want to be in the thick of the action.
- Tactics Tank – A more versatile option with broader gadget compatibility, suited to players who like to adapt on the fly.
Each tank has its own set of Gadgets, and upgrading those Gadgets with Parts you earn from enemy drops dramatically changes how your build plays. Combine a Speed Tank with the right Relic Powers and a rapid-fire weapon, and you’re a slippery skirmisher darting through ink lanes. Swap to Power Tank with a heavy splat weapon and buffed Gadgets, and suddenly you’re a wrecking ball. The depth here is genuinely surprising for a Splatoon game, and tinkering with your loadout between raids quickly becomes one of the most satisfying parts of the whole experience.
Weapons, Gadgets, and Customisation
Over 100 weapons are available across the game, each sitting in a rarity tier and some carrying passive abilities that stack with your build. You’ll recognise plenty of classic Splatoon weapon types – blasters, rollers, chargers, and splat weapons all make appearances – but the loot-style rarity system gives the hunt for a great drop a genuine sense of excitement that mainline Splatoon never had.
Gadgets and their Parts contain most of the min-maxing depth. Crafted using enemy parts gathered during raids, Gadgets can completely reshape your playstyle. The sheer variety of possible combinations ensures that even well into the post-game, there are new builds to experiment with. Relic Powers layer on top of this with passive ability buffs, and Spirhalite Shards – the main in-game currency – let you upgrade weapons at the Hideout Ship or scrap unwanted ones for materials.
The customisation extends to cosmetics too. Three new Splatoon Raiders-specific amiibo (Shiver, Frye, and Big Man in Raider attire) launched alongside the game, unlocking exclusive outfit options for the Mechanic. And if you have Switch 2 HDR output – Raiders is the first Splatoon title to support High Dynamic Range – the already vivid colour palette gets another boost on compatible displays.
Enemies and Challenge – The Salmonid Threat
Salmonids have always been the PvE enemies of choice in Splatoon, and Raiders builds an entire game around fighting them in their own territory. There are three tiers of enemy to contend with:
- Lesser Salmonids – Individually weak, but they horde in large numbers and will overwhelm you if you’re not managing the crowd.
- Boss Salmonids – Tougher enemies with distinct strengths and weaknesses that demand you read their patterns before going in swinging.
- Seasoned Salmonids – The most dangerous enemies in the game. The “saltiest” of the bunch require real build investment and situational awareness to bring down.
The difficulty curve is one of Raiders’ strongest assets. The game offers three difficulty settings – Tourist, Raider, and Survivalist – and all three reward the same loot drops, so there’s no artificial paywall gating good gear behind the hardest difficulty. But the natural progression through the campaign steadily forces you to refine your builds and think harder about your approach, with a notable spike around character level 40–45 that will send you back to grind previously explored areas if your loadout isn’t up to scratch.
Boss fights are a genuine highlight when they’re at their best, with unique mechanics that break from the standard wave-clearing format and force you to use the full toolkit. Some of the late-game bosses do lean toward damage-sponge territory, which is a legitimate criticism – but the majority reward skill and smart builds rather than just outlasting them.
Co-op – Playing With Friends
Splatoon Raiders is built for solo play first, but the co-op mode supports up to four players locally or online and adjusts difficulty based on how many people are in your group. When it works, it works brilliantly – coordinating builds with friends, bouncing off each other’s Bot Buddy abilities, and clearing raid stages together is chaotic in exactly the right way.
That said, there’s no skill-based matchmaking for the online co-op, and the gap between a well-geared, high-level player dropping into a friend’s run versus someone just starting out can create real friction. It’s not a deal-breaker for the overall package, but organised squads who play together consistently will get the most out of it.
Presentation – Visuals, Audio, and Performance
Splatoon Raiders is a stunning-looking game on Nintendo Switch 2. The shift to a wilderness setting doesn’t mute the franchise’s signature neon vibrancy – if anything, seeing bright ink splashed across ancient island ruins creates a striking visual contrast that makes the game feel distinctive and alive. The increased animated cutscene count gives the story more visual personality than anything the series has delivered before.
The audio design is worth calling out specifically. The soundtrack takes heavy influence from Salmon Run’s tense, almost horror-inflected musical style rather than the poppy energy of the multiplayer games. It creates an odd but genuinely effective juxtaposition: everything looks bright and playful, but the music tells you something is very wrong on these islands. It suits Raiders’ mystery-exploration tone perfectly.
Performance on Switch 2 is rock solid. The game runs smoothly across solo and co-op sessions, and four-player online play doesn’t take a meaningful hit. HDR support on compatible displays gives the already-vivid palette an extra edge.
One legitimate visual gripe: things can get very busy at peak combat moments. Four-player co-op with ink flying in every direction, Gadget effects firing off, and Salmonid hordes filling the screen can make it genuinely hard to read what’s happening. It’s a known trade-off of the Splatoon aesthetic but it hits harder in Raiders’ more frantic scenarios than it did in the competitive titles.
What Could Be Better
Splatoon Raiders is a very good game, but it’s not a flawless one. Here’s where it stumbles:
- Mission variety runs thin mid-game. The three stage types are well-designed, but the formula starts to feel repetitive before the late-game story missions arrive to shake things up again.
- The story stays thin. Deep Cut are a joy, but the broader narrative doesn’t dig as deep as the Islands’ premise suggests it could.
- Locked loadouts during raids. Not being able to equip mid-raid drops until you return to base is a deliberate design choice, but it can frustrate in longer sessions.
- Difficulty spike at level 40–45. The challenge ramps sharply at this point and essentially forces XP grinding if your build hasn’t kept pace. Fine for looter-shooter veterans, potentially off-putting for more casual players.
- No competitive multiplayer. This is by design, not an oversight – but if Turf War is what you come to Splatoon for, Raiders isn’t the game you’re looking for.
Splatoon Raiders – Review Scores Across the Board
Critic reception has been broadly strong, with Raiders sitting at a Metacritic score of 81 and an OpenCritic of 83 at time of publication. IGN awarded it a 9/10, Nintendo Life landed at 9/10, Game Informer gave it an 8.8/10, and Pocket Tactics pushed as high as 10/10. GiantBomb landed at 3.5/5, while Metro GameCentral (6/10) and Stevivor (6/10) were among the more sceptical voices, arguing the game’s departure from competitive Splatoon formula left something essential behind. The Guardian’s 4/10 was the outlier, calling it a “run-of-the-mill” experience – a verdict that stands apart from the wider critical consensus.
Is Splatoon Raiders Worth Buying?
Yes, and it’s not especially close. Splatoon Raiders is a confident, polished, and genuinely inventive game that takes the series somewhere new without losing what makes it special. The build-crafting depth, the satisfying loot loop, the Spirhalite Islands’ visual identity, and the excellent performance on Switch 2 all contribute to a game that’s easy to recommend to almost any Nintendo player.
If you’re a Splatoon fan who has always wished the single-player content could carry its own full game, Raiders is everything you’ve been asking for. If you’re newer to the franchise and looking for a great Switch 2 action game with genuine depth, this is one of the strongest reasons to own the hardware right now.
It has its rough edges – mission variety gets repetitive, the story doesn’t reach the heights the premise hints at, and the difficulty spike in the mid-to-late game isn’t always gracefully handled. But none of that stops Splatoon Raiders from being one of the most enjoyable Nintendo games of 2026 and a legitimate landmark moment for the franchise.
For more action-packed reviews like this one, check out our take on Crimson Desert, and if you’re into challenging solo adventures with deep progression systems, our Slay the Spire 2 Early Access Review is worth a read. And for something more narrative-focused, don’t miss our Samson: A Tyndalston Story Review.
You can find the official Splatoon Raiders listing on Nintendo’s official site for full game details, pricing, and purchase options.
Splatoon Raiders Review – Final Verdict
Score: 8.5 / 10
Splatoon Raiders is more than a spin-off – it’s the best argument yet that Splatoon’s DNA is strong enough to carry a full solo adventure. Deep customisation, satisfying loot progression, fantastic visual and audio presentation, and the irresistible charm of Deep Cut make this a Switch 2 must-play. Some mission repetition, a thin story, and a mid-game difficulty wall keep it from perfection, but for anyone with a Switch 2 in their hands right now, this is one of the first games you should boot up.
