The Splatoon 2 Testfire Gave Us An Inkling Of Its New Depths

Over the weekend, in little hour-long fits and starts, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild had some competition for the most played game on Nintendo Switch. For the vast majority of people, the Splatoon 2 Testfire brought a first look at the sequel to Nintendo’s popular multiplayer shooter, giving us another glimpse at what’s stayed the same and what’s changed since the original.

There’s a lot that’s immediately familiar from the first game in the Testfire, from the music to the look of this demo’s stripped down, barebones menus, through to the actual multiplayer gameplay. The aim of the Turf War game mode is still exactly the same, with victory determined by how much of the ground you’ve covered in your team’s paint, as opposed to trying to kill the enemy. Splatting them into little squid ghosts obviously helps, but you also need to play cleverly and try to cover as much of the map as possible.

First impressions are everything, though, and when Splatoon 2 continues to use the console’s gyroscope for aiming by default, Dave’s first impressions weren’t great.

Immediately after starting Splatoon 2, I ran into major issues when it came to controlling it using the gyro controls. Thankfully I was able to switch to using normal twin-sticks for movement and looking around, but it’s not obvious for someone coming into the preview blind. The game itself is largely the same as Splatoon was on Wii U, which in this case is not a terrible idea given the low uptake on the Wii U compared to the reception of the Switch.

Each of the four weapons took a little getting used to, as well as remembering that you can perform an ultra-attack to rain havoc on nearby foes, but if you have a group of friends willing to work together then this could be a great amount of fun. Here’s hoping Nintendo reveal voice-communication and party features at a console level, because this game needs that in order to work.

Those four weapons, however, have seen a fair few changes since the first game. The returning Splattershot, Splat Charger, Splat Roller are joined by the new Splat Dualies, badass paint guns akimbo. Each of these weapons is actually a whole loadout, with a sub weapon and a special attack. These specials now go beyond simply offering up an unlimited supply of the sub weapon.

The Splat Roller is still the equivalent to a shotgun in this game, letting you cover huge areas of the map with paint really easily, but then forcing you to get pretty close to an enemy to splat them, either rolling over them or flinging paint from a short distance. However, if you fling paint while you jump, it’s now thrown as a vertical line, giving you longer reach, but needing you to be more precise. Their special, meanwhile, is now the Splashdown, that sees you jump into the air and then come smashing down and covering a wide area around you.

The Splat Dualies might just be my favourite, not only looking cool, with a dodge roll move when you’re firing, but coming with the curling bomb that heads off in a straight line, bounces of things and then explodes. It’s great for creating a path that you can swim through. That’s joined by the Inkjet, which isn’t a printer, but a jetpack so you fly up into the sky and can fling paint bombs from up on high.

The Splattershot now has the Tenta Missile lock on missile launcher – don’t worry, you can dodge incoming missiles if you’re quick – the Splat Charger comes with the Stingray that spews a huge stream of paint in a slow to aim stream, and so on. It feels like a lot of this is Nintendo fleshing out and rebalancing the existing weapons and all the combos have more nuance and little tricks that you can learn.

Jake also enjoyed these newer and deeper little twists to the weapons.

I enjoyed using one of Splatoon’s new weapons in the one hour that I’ve played which are the dual-wielding Splat Dualies. They can be used to push people off the stage when you dodge roll – this is what i spent most of my hour doing. With the new abilities also being the cause of my death a lot of the time, I feel the game has become much more of a game of tactics, which suits my competitive nature just fine.

The colours and effects of the paint really does pop on the Switch’s native screen, which is how I played – my only problem here was finding the gyroscopic aiming to be too fiddly. Naturally, everything felt graphically tighter than the original Splatoon and the animations are executed so well that it adds a sense of that Nintendo silliness that we’ve loved since the beginning.

Being able to play in handheld mode is a new twist on the game that wasn’t possible on the Wii U. The original insisted on having the Gamepad’s screen devoted to the map and being able to Super Jump to your teammates, not letting you play off screen. Now you don’t have a second screen, the map and Super Jump has you pressing X to bring it up. It’s an understandable tradeoff, but I do wish that the game would get some touch screen support, which would feel more intuitive.

Some of the quirks and oddities of the first Splatoon remain. Why can I not change my weapons and loadout during a match? Or, failing that, while waiting in the lobby with an Overwatch-esque team composition indicator? Hopefully those things, those little hang-ups can be resolved before the game is released this summer. At the same time, they’ve plenty of work to do outside the game, rolling out their full suite of online functionality, with parties and voice chat coming as part of a smartphone app.

At the end of the day, Splatoon 2 is more of Splatoon, which can only be a good thing, especially given how regularly Nintendo were criticised for not innovating with their games and always leaning on tried and tested game characters. Where Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is already at that pinnacle of karting, Splatoon is still getting up to speed as a franchise, and a direct sequel instead of a remaster of the Wii U original is the right move, bringing with it new weapons, new maps and a smattering of new ideas.

More importantly, I’ve got high expectations of a Squid Jump 2 mini-game.