Thoughts on the Splatoon 3 Demo

Developer: Nintendo EPD
Available on: Nintendo Switch

In two weeks, Nintendo will release Splatoon 3, the third installment of their popular shooter. Yesterday, a free demo of its PvP multiplayer was made available for 12 hours. I spent much of the day playing it.

I haven’t played any of Splatoon or Splatoon 2, so I can’t compare this new game to them.

The demo of Splatoon 3 featured what they call a Splatfest, where players pledge their loyalty to one of three teams, then compete to see which one is the best. By winning matches, you score for your team. In this case, the three teams were rock, paper, and scissors. I joined team rock (and we destroyed the competition). 

I was able to download the demo before the multiplayer went live. The game walked me through creating a character, sent me through a brief tutorial, then dropped me off at the in-game town. Everything was under construction in the town and the place was a bit dull. All we could do was customize our character a little and post messages/drawings that can be seen by other players (I got to see lovely messages such as “if your girl is straight, why is she on team scissors?”)

Then 11 AM CT hit, and the whole area was reloaded. Suddenly, the town was now fully constructed and full of life. The townsfolk were dancing like a big party was going down, and the doors to the lobby where you can join matches were finally unlocked.

The premise of Splatoon matches is simple. Players have paint guns which they may use to paint the walls & floors, and splat (kill) players on the opposing team. When time’s up, whichever team has painted more of the map with their color wins. Matches are very short, fast-paced, and, as I discovered, quite fun.

Paint doesn’t just serve as the criteria for winning. When you hold down ZL, you turn into a squid. As a squid, you can dive into your team’s paint, where you can move faster, replenish ink (paint), and become almost invisible to enemies. If you’re standing on the enemy team’s paint though, you can’t do it. In fact, while on the enemy team’s paint, your movement is slowed and you gradually take damage. Covering the map with paint directly impacts your team’s ability to win fights. 

Any paint can be easily painted over by the opposing team. Control of areas can be quickly overturned. You always have to move fast to maintain control of the map. There’s always work to be done fighting for the center and making sure your team’s territory is well painted. If you’re feeling lucky, you can try and push into the enemy team’s territory for more surface to paint.

The controls are simple and responsive. You can switch between diving in paint and firing your gun seamlessly. Players have little health. Fights are fast; you often go from full health to dead almost instantly, but you respawn quickly. 

By default, aiming is done using motion controls, not analog sticks. After changing this at the soonest available opportunity, I found the controls for aiming to be pretty solid. As far as I can tell there’s no sort of aim assist, so making precise shots is difficult, but for guns that aren’t snipers, this ends up not mattering much.

There are a number of weapons to choose from, each of which comes with a pre-set loadout that includes a sub-weapon (or gadget) and a special (ultimate ability). There are paint-equivalents of machine guns, shotguns, snipers, gatling guns, etc. There’re also big paint brushes and paint rollers for more close-ranged combat.

Not all of the weapons are good, but none of them are overpowered. I’ve seen most of them excel in the right hands, but they never felt unfair or unbeatable. 

The more hours I put into the demo (and the more intense the matches got), the more fun I had splatting my opponents and competing for dominance. 

That said, there are some things I took issue with.

The HUD isn’t great. I was particularly frustrated by how the ink meter is only displayed when you’re taking cover in the paint and not when you have your weapon out. Your character does have a meter on their back, but your eyes are never drawn towards it; they’re laser-focused on the guy you’re trying to hit. There’s no obvious indication you’re about to run out of paint until you do.

I also don’t like the placement of the icon that tells you if your special is ready or not. It’s in the top right corner, mostly out of sight. I wish it was at the bottom and closer to the center. You lose the charge on it anytime you die, and it often goes wasted cause in the heat of battle it’s unclear if it’s fully charged.

I wish you could change weapons mid-match. As it is, you’re committed to whatever loadout you choose upon entering matchmaking, before you know what map it is and what weapons everyone else chose. This proves to be annoying as most of the guns are a bit situational. Blasters (shotguns) are no good when the enemy team has a strong hold over the map as it becomes difficult to get in close. Rollers are excellent at covering large areas with paint but make for poor weapons in fights that aren’t point blank. Snipers are unmatched in range and power, but they’ll never win a match alone as they can’t paint large areas quickly. For solo-queue people like myself, having a healthy team comp of weapons is a matter of pure luck.

The process of matchmaking is also annoying. While matchmaking, the game puts you in a practice area where you can warm up. You can’t access the menu or change your gear while you’re matchmaking. You also can’t cancel matchmaking after you get it started (at one point I needed to re-queue cause of a network issue, and the only way I could do it was to reset the game). After a match, you’re given 3 options: “keep going” (queue for another match), “stop” (don’t queue), or “change gear first”. By default, the cursor is on “keep going” and after some time I found myself usually mindlessly selecting it. Sometimes, I’d then instantly regret it as I was interested in trying a different weapon and, because I can’t cancel, I had to wait until after the next match to get my next chance to switch it. All of these restrictions were confusing and frustrating.

There’s even more to pick on when you pry further into the details.

Let’s compare it to Overwatch for a moment. Fights in Overwatch are often very fast-paced and chaotic. As such, the developers included several features meant to provide clarity as to what’s happening. Enemies are always outlined in red so you can easily tell them apart from allies. Anytime you hit an enemy with your gun, symbols appear around your crosshairs to let you know. If it’s a headshot, those symbols are red and a satisfying “ting” sound plays. After damaging an enemy, their health bar becomes visible so you know how close to death they are. When you get a kill, a particular sound plays and, if you were the one that landed the final hit, the game tells you what percentage of their max health you dealt, which helps give you a sense of how much damage your weapons are dealing. When you die, the camera instantly turns to the person that killed you and highlights them so you know from where you were killed. There’s also a kill feed that tells you anytime someone is killed, by who and with what. Even in the most chaotic and confusing moments, I can almost always piece together what happened when the dust settles. 

Splatoon doesn’t do all this nearly as well. In Splatoon, there’s no feedback that tells you if you’re dealing damage, there’s only a message that tells you if you finished someone off. It can be hard at times to tell the difference between friend and foe. There’s nothing that indicates how close an enemy is to death (granted it doesn’t matter as much in this game, but it’s still annoying). When you die, the camera just locks in place and nothing happens for a few seconds; it’s not always instantly clear that you did die. The game does eventually tell you who killed you and with what weapon, but you don’t have clarity as to where it was from or how it went down.

I’d like to imagine all of these issues will be addressed in future updates, but, well, this is the third game of the series. If the developers didn’t think much of them in the previous installments, it’s hard to imagine they will now.

At the end of the day though, these issues are relatively small. I still had a lot of fun playing the demo for Splatoon 3. How long the fun will last is to be seen; I highly doubt I’ll play it for as long as I did Overwatch. Right now though, I’m itching for the full game to release so I can jump back into it.