Shooting and Squirting Ink

Last week Nintendo was nice enough to offer fans a demo (albeit a very brief one) of their upcoming colorful third person shooter Splatoon.   They offered the demo in three one hour periods across the weekend of May 8-10.  During the weekend I was fortunate enough to spend close to two full hours with Splatoon.  Obviously, this demo is in no way shape or form the FINAL product, but I still came away with mixed results on Nintendo’s latest innovational idea.   I was thrilled, excited, amazed, pissed, frustrated, and bored during my time with Splatoon.

i can’t imagine a more colorful looking game.

Just to go over some quick basics I was only able to play one mode and on the exact same map for every match I entered.  I know the final product will contain several varieties of game modes and maps, but I can’t say whether Nintendo just provided Turf War and the one map I got to play on over and over, or if I was just poor luck on my part.  Either way playing the same map again and again got tiresome rather quickly.

When the demo first boots up you are given the option to create your character with several options like choosing your sex, character’s skin color, t-shirt, t-shirt color and more.  It wasn’t anything eye opening in the world of customization options, and to be 100% honest I didn’t even waste time with this aspect.  For whatever reason, Nintendo decided to roll out this demo into three one hour blocks.  During these pre-determined time periods players were able to play Splatoon’s online mode for free.  However, I knew that my time was of the essence and when it came to things like picking an orange shirt over a purple one I just said “screw it” and ran with the defaults.

After skipping through the character set up screen I was taken through a very dull and drawn out tutorial.  The tutorial felt like it had been designed for dummies, and I understand the need to give players a quick heads up on how the game controls and give some strategies on how to play, problem is the tutorial took me twenty minutes to go through and that was with me trying to speed through as much of it as I could.  Considering time was of the essence Nintendo really dropped the ball, or paint bucket, with their delivery choice of this demo.  I mean who wants to spend ten minutes customizing their character followed by a twenty minute tutorial when they only have an hour to play the game?   That’s going to take up half your allotted one hour time, and sorry Nintendo, but this was an incredible dumb way to let players test out Splatoon.

BOOM! B*tch get out the way!

Anyways, moving on to the actually game itself as previously stated I was only ever to play in the games Turf War mode and it took place on the same map each time.  Turf War is all about spreading your team’s paint color all over the entire freaking place.  Once the allotted timer ends the game (a fat-ass cat who proclaims to be a judge) comes along and decides who covered the map with the most ink.   And there’s your winner!!!   I loved the idea of this mode for two reasons.  The first is while, yes you can kill opposing players, it has no real effect on the game’s outcome besides the time that is “wasted” for them to respawn at their team’s home base.  This promotes players to work together to achieve a common goal: suffocating the map with your ink, and surprisingly players seemed to respond to the game’s objective quite well.  I ran into very few matches where players decided to turn Turf War into Team Deatchmatch and go on a killing rampage.  All in all it looks like players clearly understand the game Nintendo designed for them and where playing it as intended.

The second reason I fell in love with Turf War was for the game’s astonishingly beautiful color palate.  The maps have a variety of “cartoony” looking backgrounds and colors to begin with, but soaking the map in huge waves of Blue and Orange colors only adds to the pretty landscape.   Your parents my tell you that graffiti is illegal and immoral; that it’s defacing public property and an outrage!  Well, in Splatoon it’s an absolute blast to gush buckets of paint all over the screen. So screw parental authority in this case.

Game’s a taken in a 4 vs. 4 player format.

Despite the games colorful visuals and four different classes to choose from Splatoon is a very imbalanced game.  For starters, I’m not sure if class is even the proper way to describe Splatoon’s character selection screen.  Before each game started you could choose between four different weapons.  The “Ink Roller”, which allowed you to run along the map with a trail of paint in front and behind you.  Then there were two other guns, one that shot paint out similar to using a garden house and spraying water and another one was more of a scattered paint gun spurting out wider less concentrated paint shots.   Splatoon appears to be a game in which your character attributes are separate from the gun you pick for your loadout, but without any sort of “editing your character/loadout” screens in the demo it’s tough to say.   My best guess would be that your character has no attributes or anything tied specifically to the gun you choose to spawn with, but instead gun choice is more of a playstyle preference.

Sadly my time with Splatoon wasn’t all fun and games.   The “Ink Roller” character was by far the most powerful and best character to use.  The game’s objective is to cover the ground with the most paint so if you avoid conflict with the other team you are also simultaneously covering  the ground with your paint when playing as the Ink Roller.  The Ink Roller also has a move that mirrors when a football player spikes the ball after scoring a touchdown.  The Ink Roller can slam its well…roller on the ground and create a huge splash effect that kills all foes near it.

Your ammo is your paint and it only refills upon death or by swimming around as an inkling (a squid to be exact)  in already laid down paint.  The other classes just couldn’t stand up to the Ink Roller.  It took far too long to kill the Ink Roller by just spraying them with paint, and all the Ink Roller has to do is walk up to you and do its melee attack and boom back to the start you go.  It just wasn’t very fair.

Splatoon only offered one control scheme in the demo and that was playing with the gamepad.  For the most part everything controlled smooth and fluid.  However, the default setting has you aiming using the Wii U’s gyro-sensor’s and literally moving the game pad up and down to aim.  Playing this way was atrocious and not recommended.  It felt very unintuitive and slow, but lucky there was an option to turn off the motion controls for aiming.   I’d personally prefer to use the Wii U pro controller for a game like Splatoon, but none of Nintendo’s various controls were an option here aside from the GamePad.   It remains to be seen what different control options the final product will have, but going on Nintendo’s record, I suspect multiple control schemes will be supported.

I may have only spent around 95 minutes or so with Splatoon but my brief time showed me the game has a lot of potential.  It was extremely colorful, carefree and lighthearted, and aside from motion controls while aiming, played very intuitively.   However, there are still plenty of doubts and questions I have concerning Splatoon.  How many more game modes are there? Will Nintendo do a good job with post-supporting the product and providing patches and updates to make the game more balanced?  More importantly how will the community play the game?  As always, a game with so much invested in an online experience the success of that game is going to rely a ton on the community itself.  Questions arise as to whether the community will remain active, play fair, and encourage competition. Some of these will be answered on May 28 when the game launches.  Until then I’ll just have to swim around in my memories of the fun I had with my Splatoon demo and flush away the bad ones.