Note: This review covers the single-player mode of Splatoon 3. For our thoughts on its multiplayer modes, you can read my Splatoon 3 multiplayer review here.
Historically, Splatoon’s single-player campaigns have focused on acclimating you to the waters of its much more frantic and churning multiplayer battle modes. Splatoon 3’s campaign — dubbed The Return of the Mammalians — starts in territory so familiar that I was initially worried I was about to spend the next several hours slogging through tutorials on fundamentals I’d learned two games ago. Thankfully, the rug was quickly pulled out from under me, leading to a brand-new take on the series’ hub world design mixed with some of the best ideas of Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion. Splatoon 3 boldly let me decide on whether or not to blaze my own path toward any of its 70 bite-sized, inventive missions, and choose where to go next when exploring its fuzzy ooze-filled world. A lot of the enemies I found there were unchanged from previous Splatoons, but I had a great time navigating the large variety of objectives all the way to the campaign’s explosively satisfying finale.
While Splatoon 3 does its best to nudge you in the direction of multiplayer Turf Wars as soon as you customize your character, I found the single-player campaign worthwhile. During its admittedly slow intro area you’ll be introduced to a strange fuzzy ooze blocking your linear path, one that only your goofy little fish sidekick can devour – if you have enough salmon egg currency to motivate him. The ooze shares a striking resemblance to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild’s toxic blight, and touching any of the stuff will induce death by fuzzball. Upon reaching the true meat of the campaign in the icy hub world of Alterna and its six islands (which thankfully doesn’t take long), you’ll find the goop practically everywhere as you search for a missing comrade. Thankfully, the paths I opened through the deadly goo were big enough that I wasn’t constantly dying, and gaps in the goo layer offered glimpses of new paths I could open up in the future.
This fuzzy ooze serves not only as a barrier, but also an open-ended series of choices for how you want to progress. Having your little buddy devour a patch of ooze may unlock anything from shortcuts to hidden collectibles, and or potentially open a path to a kettle that will transport you to a mission or a pipe leading to the next island. You can usually get a good idea of what is lying on the other side by using certain birds-eye view panels, and by checking how much currency it costs to remove the goop. Several times I found myself weighing the odds of spending all my salmon eggs (Splatoon 3’s basic form of currency) to open up a path to the next island or trying to reveal more of the current area to find items needed to upgrade my abilities.
While the missions themselves focus solely on the task at hand, completing each one will help you uncover interesting fragments about the larger mystery behind these icy ruins, and even some very exciting revelations about how this humanoid squid-dominated world came to be. I appreciated Splatoon’s continued commitment to keep its levels focused on the challenges, while offering alluring morsels of lore and backstory in the hub world for those that want to seek them out. Meanwhile, the more urgent story of your rescue mission is fleshed out by some welcome familiar faces when you first arrive in Alterna, and smartly expands as you encounter a trio of bosses while searching for your missing friend.
While you’ll need to complete a certain number of missions to get a good chunk of currency for ooze removal, how and where you decide to do so is completely up to you because there isn’t any one mission that’s mandatory. It’s a risky move to create so many missions and then let you bypass them entirely, but I really came to appreciate how Splatoon 3 respected my time and my preferences — if I wanted to stockpile some currency by clearing a few missions to beeline through the next island straight to a boss fight, I was more than welcome to take that approach. Whether you’re just in it to race to the finale or want to take your time surveying each site and completing each mission, this campaign isn’t judging. I was able to complete the main story in around four to five hours, bypassing one island almost entirely and skipping many other missions. However, I had plenty more waiting for me later: it took me a few more hours to go back and finish every mission and survey every island site — around eight hours total.
There are plenty of reasons to stick around and explore Spatoon 3’s arctic hub world. For one, the interesting ruins of a lost human civilization covered in lethal goop are hiding all manner of collectibles. Besides the usual lore, you can also find rewards that benefit you in both single-player and multiplayer: from items that unlock upgrade tiers to cosmetics to decorate your locker in the multiplayer lobby, and even xp and money boosts to use in matches.
There are plenty of reasons to stick around and explore Spatoon 3’s arctic hub world.
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Many of these secrets lie buried in the snow, requiring the keen nose of your little buddy to pinpoint for you. He’s not exactly the brightest bioluminescent fish in the sea, and sometimes it took repeated passes before he’d rush over to indicate buried treasure, but it was so charming to watch the Smallfry scamper around and accidentally fall off cliffs that I forgave him. He also has his uses in the missions themselves, acting as part distraction, part grenade — but I rarely found a situation where tossing him into the fray was preferable to just diving in and splatting enemies myself. No matter how many Hero Gear skills I bought to increase his health and damage and decrease his cooldown times and ink usage, he never became all that useful outside of very specific missions. (Why would I want to upgrade his health if I’ve never seen enemies really hurt him?) I ended up focusing on more obvious upgrades like better weapon spread and ink capacity for myself, and I became far more effective at wiping out enemies than he was.
If you loved Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion and its approach to mission structure, you’ll be in for a treat. While Splatoon 3 is still unwilling to completely let go of your hand by way of constant chatter from your squid pals on what to do next, the missions themselves are almost always full of fun concepts that also provide some good lessons you can take with you into multiplayer matches. Most will give you a few options on different weapons, and I liked that even straightforward objectives provided opportunities to get a feel for weapon types I likely wouldn’t unlock in multiplayer for a while. Later levels even let you try out more specialized variants to better understand and appreciate the details of a weapon’s rate of fire, ink consumption, and how much terrain a shot can cover. I was excited to try out more advanced weapons like the explosive-launching bucket, or the brand-new splatana, which is lined with stamps along its ink-shooting “blade” and can be charged up to look like a chainsaw sword. Getting hands on with these ink-blasting armaments eventually influenced which weapons I chose to purchase first after spending some time in multiplayer modes.
Certain wackier missions also lean in hard on showcasing the power of Splatoon 3’s new special abilities by letting you freely play around with them with unlimited uses. Being able to zip between pillars like Spider-Man and crash down to ambush enemies using the Zipcaster was a blast, and gave me a fun environment to realize the potential of how it could be used in multiplayer. Even if it was rarely a one-to-one comparison for fighting other players online, this single-player campaign did an excellent job of preparing me for core concepts. Things like ink management, understanding weapon spread, and even using one of Splatoon 3’s two new movement options — the Squid Surge — to rapidly ascend walls and get the drop on targets after bursting upwards. I only wish it had devoted some time to showcasing the other new ability — the Squid Roll — and how to use it to effectively and quickly dodge out of harm’s way by jumping out in another direction without losing momentum.
This single-player campaign did an excellent job of preparing me for core concepts.
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Each area has a few “main-but-still-optional” missions found in gold kettles, and these take you through fairly standard objectives like battling through enemies and platforming through inked terrain to reach your goal; meanwhile, dozens of black kettles provide more interesting and often challenging goals but will charge you a small fee to access (and retry should you fail). Even the zaniest objectives can teach you about properly dividing your time between inking terrain and enemies – like a race across rapidly falling platforms, or following the narrow ink paths created by curling bombs through lethal enemy ink, requiring quick and precise banking shots. One of my favorites included a maze straight out of Pac-Man – I had to rapidly paint a path through while using an inkbrush to collect salmon eggs and beat the clock, all while dodging indestructible ink-spewing machines that I could only briefly interrupt with my Smallfry buddy.
Individual missions rarely take longer than three to five minutes, which to me hit a sweet spot that truly made these levels shine. That’s just the right amount of time to present a unique objective or gimmick, give you a few rooms to put the techniques into practice, and then showcase what you’ve learned to reach the goal — and all before the level could get drawn into repetitive tedium. Splatoon 3’s decision to relocate hidden collectibles outside of the missions themselves had me dubious at first, but ultimately the distraction-free environment lets the fast-paced nature of these levels shine.
As for the enemies you’ll face, I was a bit let down to find that the “fuzzy” versions of the same Octarians I battled against in previous Splatoon iterations are purely a cosmetic change; Octosnipers still snipe, and Octobombers still lob bombs. Splatoon 3 offers practically no new enemy types save for two new additions I spotted. One new Octarian variant emits a shockwave you have to jump over, which was a nice way of preparing me for similar shockwave attacks that appear in both the PvE Salmon Run mode and in PvP.
Levels often remixed these ideas with enemy placement in clever ways so that I never really felt like I was retreading the same ground.
Individual missions rarely take longer than three to five minutes, which to me hit a sweet spot that truly made these levels shine.
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While there are also plenty of returning platforming mechanics like ink rails and sponges, the levels often remixed these ideas with enemy placement in clever ways so that I never really felt like I was retreading the same ground. Concepts like soaker blocks that required you to ink an initial block to extend more platforms outward for a short duration seemed like a simple concept, until I had to contend with enemies firing upon me and inadvertently undoing my platform-building in the process.
Splatoon 3’s bosses are a fun lot to face off against, but the specifics of how they work are best left to find out for yourself. While they still follow the familiar formula of “shoot the boss when exposed three times to win,” this new set of bosses are much more personable and feature a flair that adds to their charm. One, in particular, gave me some amazing Super Mario Sunshine vibes. Granted, the difficulty of these encounters isn’t too demanding, but I’ll happily take them over yet another slight iteration of Octo bosses from previous entries.
I was happy to see Splatoon 3 build from the groundwork laid in Splatoon 2’s Octo Expansion and its finale, with the stakes only getting higher to create a highly memorable experience — including a spectacular final boss that combines a perfect blend of over-the-top spectacle with iconic Splatoon musical beats. Even after that, completionists may uncover things to do after the story, like an ultimate challenge run to put your abilities to the test — one that provided a sense of exhilaration I haven’t felt since Mario Odyssey’s Darker Side of the Moon.
