Splatoon Raiders

Splatoon Raiders is a spinoff of the Splatoon series and is primarily single-player and story-focused, unlike the multiplayer-centric mainline entries. Raiders is a third-person shooter, borrowing some gameplay elements from the looter shooter subgenre, that revolves around the usage of ink as ammunition and means of replenishing said ammunition by submerging into the liquid. Ink also serves as a method of navigation; players can swim through their own colored ink, while being slowed down when in contact with enemies' ink. Players choose to be either an Inkling or Octoling as their player character, who takes on the role of a mechanic. Their avatar's physical appearance can be manually tweaked and adorned with various outfits.

Each of the game's over 100 total weapons, differentiated in level and rarity, are divided amongst eleven classes, all of which return from past Splatoon entries. Said weapons are based on paint rollers, paint brushes, water guns, bow and arrows, and others. Players equip secondary armaments known as "gadgets", which supplant the "sub weapons" from previous Splatoon games. Gadgets enable specialized manuevers or powered attacks, and each is linked to one of three specific player-worn "ink tanks"—the Speed Tank, Power Tank, and Tactical Tank—with unique characteristics.

The Splatoon series takes place 12,000 years into the far future on a post-apocalyptic Earth following the extinction of humans and most mammals, implied to be the result of rampant climate change. After this event, the planet is repopulated with evolved, terrestrial marine animals who in the present day reside in the regions of Inkadia and the Splatlands. Such creatures include the Inklings and Octolings, humanoid squids and octopuses respectively, whom players take control of. Within the Splatlands is the hub world of Splatoon 3, a city known as Splatsville.

Shiver, Frye, and Big Man of the idol group Deep Cut host the city's news broadcasts, while the Mechanic is a Splatsville resident. Also within the Splatlands is the remote Spirhalite Islands; they are so distant from the mainland that they have their own climate and travel by helicopter is required to reach them.

Splatoon Raiders was first conceived during the later period of Splatoon 3's update cycle, specifically in parallel with the production of that game's Grand Festival event held in September 2024. The team wanted to explore the potential of a dedicated single-player version of Salmon Run, a cooperative game mode in previous Splatoon entries that involved attacking hordes of Salmonids to deposit their Golden Eggs into a container. Feeling that such gameplay adapted for single-player would be "hectic yet exhilarating", they sought to take advantage of the Switch 2's higher processing power to increase the number of Salmonids that could be present. When asked why the team created a single-player spin-off following Splatoon 3 as opposed to a fourth mainline installment, producer Seita Inoue stated that Raiders was envisioned as an entry point to the series for newcomers, leveraging the strengths of Splatoon's non-competitive features. Raiders inherited the experimental design philosophy shared by both downloadable content (DLC) single-player campaigns of past installments, Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion (2018) and Splatoon 3: Side Order (2024).

In reworking Salmon Run's gameplay into a digestible single-player format, the team needed to make it feasible "for one person to do what was done with four people". Their first approach was to add equippable traps that the player would lay around them to assist in combat, akin to tower defense gameplay. This approach was rejected because developers thought that building fortified defenses and "watching it play out" was too disparate from Splatoon's more active gameplay structure. This prompted them to instead design secondary armaments that would augment the player's regular capabilities, granting more dynamic movement and combat options.

Splatoon Raiders received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregation website Metacritic, and 88% of critics recommended the game on OpenCritic. As of July 27, 2026, Raiders was ranked in the top 10 highest-rated user-reviewed Metacritic games of all time, with a user score of 9.3/10. It is also the highest-rated user-reviewed Nintendo game on the same site.

Raiders' core gameplay structure was deemed enjoyably frenetic and engaging. Christian Donlan of Eurogamer felt a constant sense of "forward momentum" with hectic combat he likened to both contemporary Doom titles and Donkey Kong Bananza (2025). Logan Plant from IGN hailed it as one of the best Switch 2 games thus far, praising its gameplay, experimentation mechanics, difficulty curve, and "roguelike" mission structure. Alex Olney of Nintendo Life lauded the raw power of the new variations of Salmonids, as well as the more difficult "Spicy" mode that he felt significantly heightened the game's replay value.