Splatoon 3 Review

After me not liking Splatoon 2's single player that much to the point where I didn't even finish it, Splatoon 3's campaign was a pleasant surprise.

What I liked about is that first, I am glad they finally dropped that awful continue system where you get kicked out of a level if you die 3 times, now if you reach a checkpoint you can retry as much as you want, I am glad this is here since this is one of the biggest reasons why I was able to beat the game especially when the final area did somewhat start to ramp up in challenge. The Mr. Grizz fight in particular would've made me rage quit the game if I had to restart the entire fight from the begginning since the final stage has a number can have you get instantly killed by accidentally failing two jumps before you have to collect a certain number of orbs to get closer.

The levels themselves have a decent amount of variety and unlike Splatoon 2, the game mostly lets you choose what loadout you want to have before starting a level where in Splatoon 2, only some levels gave you different weapons.

The hub world is much less of an annoying pain to traverse and it's overall much easier to get around it and get to the different levels, less annoying mini puzzles to get to the individual stages, I dislike hub worlds in a lot of games so Splatoon 3 letting me get to the stages faster was welcome.

While this was in Splatoon 2, gyro aiming feels great and from what I experienced gyro aiming on the Switch feels a lot better than it does on PS5. Precision weapons don't feel like a game of constantly nudging the analog stick to line up my shots and the best part is, I don't have to crank up aim assist to feel like I am competent at hitting things from a distance.

The last area in the rocket ship was great and it feels like a Nintendo level where it introduces ideas and then slowly eases you through them as you go through the level.

One example is where you get different finishing moves to wipe out a huge array of enemies and another is having a "gooey grappling hook" of sorts and you have to line up your grapples to get a certain number of orbs to progress further.

The aforementioned final boss is decent stuff and has for the most part, has just enough challenge to back up the specticle, the smallfry campanion you gets great use and while the final phase of Mr. Grizz can get pretty aggrevating for those who haven't master Splatoon's squid jump mechanics, the checkpoint system cancels it out.

After all this praise, what holds this campaign back? The enemy variety could be better, it's decent as a whole but here could've been more enemies than constantly shoving squids, bigger squids and squids behind turrets. The game throws in some newer enemies like a moving rocket, enemies with the same moveset as you and metal sponges who can only be damaged after attacking you and their weak spot shows.

Then again for all I know there is probably some enemies I missed and there are some great moments where all of them get combined but this leads to my biggest issue, you don't even have to do all the levels to get to the final boss. While the sheer number of levels of Splatoon 3 is impressive, I would've prefered a traditional stage by stage platforming affair instead of this pseudo collectathon. This might really be helpful for people who want to get better at the multiplayer, this structure is null and void for people who just want to get to the end of the game like I do. Splatoon 3 has some levels I couldn't beat but it didn't matter since I go to random easier ones and get the points needed to progress to the main bosses and the final level.

As a result, I might skipped a lot of content, this is a shame since Splatoon 3 makes a lot of steps forward but this detrimental flaw is what prevents me from recommending Splatoon 3 for the single player unless if you are going to 100% the game, you are better off getting the game on a sale and that's if you can easily find Nintendo games going for cheap, if you can then try out the campaign, if you are going to 100% the single player or play for the multiplayer then maybe it's worth it at full price.