Splatoon 3 needs to learn the right lessons from Splatoon 2's Octo Expansion

(Image credit: Nintendo)

From what we've seen to that extent, Splatoon 3 isn't stressful to reinvent the wheel. Nintendo is retention what worked for next year's squid paintball subsequence – and that flat with a new place setting and some new tools to play with, we'll still largely comprise flinging ourselves against each other in 4v4 ink-flinging matches like before.

I've written before on why that's more than okay. Splatoon 2 is still the freshest shooter around, a surprisingly deep agonistic arena serving a community that's jr., queerer and more socially conscious than most other shooters. But where Splatoon does need change is in the game's single-player offerings, which we got our first tease of during a Holocene Nintendo Direct.

Disdain some Splatoon and its sequel having lengthy "Hero Mode" campaigns, the serial publication has been in need of a confusion for close to time. The to the lowest degree interesting thing Splatoon 3 could fare is run the same track finished a third time – another Octo Canyon, another hard of hub worlds, another end boss fight back against some other iteration of DJ Octavio's giant wasabi automaton.

Merely Nintendo has already remixed the chase after with Splatoon 2's sole piece of DLC, Octo Expansion. And if Splatoon 3 can carry the appendage beat laid go through by the series' strangest, most inventive campaign thus far, we could be looking at something very special indeed.

Here's the affair: Hero Mode is fine. It's good, even! Organic more like a Superior Mario game than any traditional shooter campaign, Italian sandwich Mode's short, bespoke levels is Nintendo doing what it does unexceeded– introducing, expanding happening and returning to new mechanism at a brisk pace, testing your movement, shooting, and house painting skills with new baddies and rising map objects. As a way to get to grips with Splatoon's world and mechanics, it's airtight.

Merely it's just each a little dry. Splatoon 2's story isn't just a passabl rote Saturday morning sketch intimacy – it's a direct retread of the first game's plot that sees the bounteous macguffin stolen by the Octarian menace, albeit with one key twist to mix in things up. And while missions are great at tutorialising Splatoon's mechanics, Hero Mode never sincerely challenges until the final boss. Unlocking secrets testament nonunion improving glimpses of Splatoon's shockingly deep lore, but the active story isn't anything to shout household active.

Tickets, please

Octo Expansion, in comparison, deserves to be shouted close to in the cookie-cutter way we fawn o'er Titanfall 2's stellar press. Reframing the campaign every bit a Portal-like series of test chambers, Splatoon 2's Octo Elaboration leans full into the idea of Splatoon as a puzzle-platformer. Cardinal mission will have you using chargers (snipers) American Samoa cues for a colossal game of kitty, while others will have you figuring out how to collect eighter data-points crosswise a map well-stacked atop a constantly rotating gyroscope. Notoriously, a good few tests involve bumping an 8-ball across precarious obstacle courses while baddies try their hardest to stake it into oblivion.

Totally of this is framed in a anatomical structure that images a campaign as a metro system, literally taking the train between different challenge Stations. There are Little Jo "thangs" to collect spread across the system, and it's whispered to fetch stuck when you commonly have a well three or four options for routes to go down. Where Hero Modality offers only five weapons to test, Octo's stations come with a kitchen stove of loadouts to try – opening ahead the entire game's outlandish arsenal of paint-flinging weapons while offering higher rewards for trying trickier weapons.

Non even the bosses (harder versions of those ground in Hero Mode) are mandatory until the game's terminative chapter, which eschews the tube initialise for an dead stunning right-shot finale whose oddity ranges from Metal Gear-style sneaking sections to a fantastic recontextualisation of the game's multiplayer Turf Wars.

Yes, Octo Expansion gets much harder than Hero Mode (as anyone World Health Organization's banged their head against the secret final boss testament attest). But it's so much more than creative, relishing in the possibility space afforded by Splatoon's specific mechanics. That same curiosity extends into Octo Expansion's story that, per the discover, raises doubt over the single evil of Hero Musical mode's Octarians by having you play American Samoa ace.

Plenty much fish

In Hero Manner, Agent 4 pops into a sewer to be told they have to save the populace. In Octo Expansion, Federal agent 8 wakes ahead amnesiac on the floor of a remiss subway station with a age group cuttle cruising for a fight. I'm immediately more endeared to the last mentioned, and that set-awake kicks inactive a drive that is such much interested in story, character, and finally giving these weird fish-people something to do.

Characters get, advantageously, word picture in shipway Hero Mode never offered. Live chat logs enclose you to the game's idols, Marina and Pearl, as they try to help Agent 8 off this nightmare metro. All line is populated by its own bizarre inhabitants and more regular faces like the Cap'n, Iso Padre, and the holothurian that's apparently running the evidenc. The expansion's closing dissemble also cranks up the stakes with cinematics of a kind the unfit only if excited at before, finding shots that truly pulled at my heart after Eight and I had spent such time on the rails together.

Octo Elaboration is also deeper, stranger, moodier than Hero Mode ever was. I'll e'er be sad that Splatoon's azygos player offerings don't dip into the fresh urban look and sound of its own multiplayer maps (a kind of Jet Calamary Radio Future, if you will), but Octo supplants that by leaning into the weirdest depths of the aesthetic – pulling from the inherent strangeness of deep-sea life and tinting it with trippy synthetic beats.

Cardinal to Grinder

Arsenic a fun distraction, Hero Mode has always been fresh at its job. A neat little set back of puzzles to prepare you for the inky gauntlet of online matchmaking. But Octo Expansion proved that Splatoon's world is ripe for exploration, the depths of its paintball swimming far from unknown. It's the kind of mode that could absolutely carry the game, which makes IT all sadder that it's locked behind a $20 DLC.

It's a direction I really hope Splatoon 3 carries forwards. And for all my concerns that Nintendo International Relations and Security Network't reinventing what single thespian in Splatoon prat even be, I'm already liking what I'm seeing. Splatoon 3's house trailer sported some absolutely sensational imagery, and is increasing interesting questions for veteran fans. It sure as hell looks like the first game's Agent 3 is chilling with the Squid Sisters, our new lead goes through a couple of outfit changes, and in that location's the ever so-pressing interrogative sentence of what's up with that fish in your backpack?

That we're even interrogatory these questions suggests that Splatoon 3's campaign will be more than some other Hero Way Re-run. But it's too early to secern if that narrative oddment leave be matched automatically – whether we'll see puzzles to rival or exceed Octo Elaboration's creatively strange essa stations. If it does, I'm excited to see Splatoon 3 surpass the light distractions of Submarine sandwich Mode to become a story worth experiencing in its possess justly.

Aboard Splatoon 3, check kayoed our roundup of forthcoming Switch games to see what other is on the horizon.