Ink Different: ’Splatoon 2’ Is Great, But It’s Not Exactly New

Bless the sound designers and Foley artists who worked on Splatoon 2: the hypercolored team-based shooter boasts a squish-per-minute count that has got to be the highest in videogame history. In one illustrative sequence, I sink into the ground and burrow along a path of luminescent purple ink of my own creation—then burst back to the surface in the middle of an industrial arena and start firing my gun. Globs of that same ink cover the ground, the walls. Every shot delivers a hollow-but-not-entirely-dry plahh as it exits the barrel, and then a wet shloip! as it splats against a surface. I fling them toward my opponent, who bursts into their own shower of ink. It's like a deathmatch designed by mess fetishists.

The sequel to Splatoon, the Wii U's surprise 2015 hit, is effortlessly witty, light, and fun. It cloaks its premise—a world dominated by children who can transform into adorable cartoon squids—in a broad pastiche of punk and skater subcultures. It takes more joy in style than perhaps any other contemporary game, revelling in music and fashion; its in-universe heroes are pop stars, not warriors. And beneath that style is a thrilling, frantic competitive shooter reworked into a party game worthy of the Nintendo pedigree. These kids shoot ink, not bullets, which somehow transmogrifies the game's violent impulses into youthful mischief.

Of course, all of the above is also true of the first Splatoon. When the squid shooter hit the Wii U, it singlehandedly ushered in a brief revitalization of Nintendo's misunderstood console. No one ever really got the Wii U, and it never fit comfortably into the ecosystem of videogame consoles, but a game like Splatoon, with this much verve and originality, had the potential to save it.

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That didn't happen; the Wii U withered, and the Switch (a much better console by all accounts) seems here to stay, leaving fans of the first game in an odd situation. Splatoon 2, which comes out on Friday, is a sequel that feels more like a reboot, refining and re-introducing what works in the series without changing much. The additions—including a more fleshed out single-player mode—are welcome, and the Switch's portability is an excellent match for the game's quick, dynamic matches. But if you spent time with the original, don't expect to be surprised.

Repetition isn't entirely without merit in this case. Splatoon's brilliance is in its pedagogy, the way its multiplayer maps worm into your brain. In any multiplayer shooter, the stages in which you play are everything, and determine your experience and your performance; if you're cartographically minded enough to internalize these arenas, you'll be better prepared to respond to your enemies. It's so ingrained in the culture of shooters that we don't call them "levels" anymore, or "arenas." We call them maps, and you need to learn them if you want to be a part of the conversation.

But Splatoon makes this learning process central to the in-game action. Competitive matches here aren't won by killing—or "splatting", as it's called—your enemies. Instead, they're won by covering the arena itself in ink; the team that covers more of the map wins. That means a meaningful part of each match is spent shooting at, and keeping track of, the scenery itself: Making sure every wall, floor, and environmental obstacle is covered with your ink, and attacking opponents for the sole purpose of creating more space to mark your territory. (You travel via those ink-pools in squid form to get places quickly, as well as to reload your weapons.)