It’s Splatoon. I love Splatoon. I’m really enjoying it, and I’m so glad that it exists; that the Splatoon formula can be expanded upon without having to be tied to a numbered entry.
The mechanics are very well implemented, and you can see the influence of Side Order on the game design. It’s categorically NOT a rougelike, but the inspiration is clear enough that it could perhaps be called rougelike-like in certain respects, despite being absolutely nothing like the game Rogue from which the term is derived.
It still can’t topple Octo Expansion for me as the best piece of single-player Splatoon content, but I still think it’s great. What Raiders does it does very well, but Octo Expansion has a level of elegance and ingenuity that is difficult to match — arguably impossible given the more freer, looser, more randomised nature of Raiders.
If Octo Expansion is a precision tool machined from a single block of aluminium, Raiders is a sort of weird, joyous bodge-job made from random scraps. It speaks to the versatility of Splatoon’s core mechanics that we can have both.
