E3 2014 - Splatoon Hands On

Splatoon was a game that came out of left field, with no-one aware of its existence until Nintendo wanted it to be shown. On the show floor they had a number of stations set up for people to experience this game and a lot of people did.

If you don’t know Splatoon is a 3rd person shooter game that, in the multiplayer at least, has you attempting to cover as much of the map as you possibly can. As you cover parts of the map with your coloured ink, you can turn into a squid to swim around in it much faster and at the same time fill your ink back up. Should you encounter an enemy player you can turn your ink onto them and if you take them down, they explode a lot of ink. So there is this risk/reward to fighting the other team, if you spend all your time just spraying ink where you can, you are more likely to be attacked and defeated by the other team and if you focus on the fight and not your spraying needs you may find come the end of the round you lose anyway.

Controlling your squid/human is easy enough, the left stick moves and the right stick looks around. If you want you can use the gyro in the Wii U gamepad, but I turned it off almost right away. To splatter your ink, you simply use the right trigger, with the left trigger turning you into your squid form. In order to remain in squid form you must hold down the left trigger, which is no real concern. Movement of the characters is fast and fluid, with jumping feeling just right.

In the two rounds that I was able to play, my team won in both of them. While I did not come first, the person who did was extremely happy about it. Perhaps the best thing that the gamepad uses is a map, to show where each member of the team is, it may not sound all that useful but trust me it is. You are even shown just what part of the map is what colour, to help you see where you need to focus your inking on. What is the best bit about the map though is that if you touch another players icon on the side, you will be launched from wherever you are on the map to where they are.

Nintendo have said that Splatoon will have a single player part as well, but based on the multiplayer experience from the show, even if it did not come with a single player part the game would still be loads of fun. 2015 can’t come soon enough.