When Nintendo announced Splatoon 3, part of me was happy, as the single player levels in Splatoon 2 provided some great times in the early Switch days. Another part of me was worried, because the series has been known to roadblock players, in uniquely Nintendo ways and while early hands on were pointing towards a happier outcome. Did the final release splat or did it become the freshest thing around?

Splatoon 3 can best be broken up into three parts, the single player, the competitive multiplayer and the co-op multiplayer and each has their pros and cons, let us begin with the single player. Much like the campaign from Splatoon 2, here the game has you undertaking a series of seemingly random objectives, as you push towards a final goal. The biggest difference though, is that this time the main story thread feels more cohesive, at least by the end, early on, it is rough. If you have played the Splatoon 2 expansion, creatively called Octo-Expansion, you will find a lot of familiar elements here, at least in terms of progression, but the bulk of it is new. My issue with the story is that you don’t get a lot of story while you are running between the various islands of Alterna and you only get lore on the location, if you happen to come across pages for your history book. You will unlock a number of them as you progress, but in order to discover most of them, you have to remove all the fuzzy ooze. Speaking of fuzzy ooze, there isn’t any real explanation about it, until the very end and if you are not paying attention, you can miss it, which makes the entire story moot, thankfully the levels are fun enough on their own.

The problem with the stages is that they can range from a 1 minute in length, with an actual countdown, to upwards of 4 or so, with the only few that took longer using mechanics to slow me down. Because you are constantly going in and out of levels, there really isn’t any flow established and given that there is nothing else to do, apart from following your little buddy to find items for the multiplayer. You don’t have to do every single mission, so if one sounds to complex, if you have enough power eggs, you can skip it, but that just means you spend more time in an overworld that is devoid of things to do. It is something that the game fails at, it has interesting levels that barely last a few minutes and an over world that offers no reason to be in it, but I still had more fun here than I did with the rest of the game.

I will say this now, the rest of the game is a slow drag and most of my problems are attributed to the constant failure of the game to make or keep a game session going online. When you are done with the adventure in Alterna, you can do nothing else until you have levelled up in Turf War and that is not being pedantic, you literally can not do anything else. The game offers up Salmon Run, Table Turf War and shopping and until you hit Level 4, no one will talk to you, well they start but then call you out for being lame and kick you out of their store. This comes back to the connection issues, the game was full of them and yes, in time those may be corrected, but that was not he case here. When you enter the lobby and select Turf War, the game has already connected you to the internet and my experience was that one out of every four attempts at finding a match would succeed, the rest would have a communications error and the game would reset me in the lobby. Should I be lucky enough to get into a match, more often than not, I got that same communications error and was then kicked back out to the lobby. There were a few times when I got to play two or three matches in a row, before I got booted because of a communications error.

When I was able to get into matches and play them, much like Splatoon 2, I had a blast, the action is chaotic and that is a good thing and with matches that are only a few minutes in length, nothing ever outstays its welcome. Given it has been so long since I put any time into Splatoon 2 multiplayer, all of the maps felt new, but Scorch Gorge and Hagglefish Market were the standouts for me, but all were fun and working out what weapon types, of the ones available to me, worked best on each was a nice challenge. I just wish I got to spend more time in the matches using the weapons, rather than the lobby, but maybe in time they will correct that.

After fighting with the game, I was able to hit level 4 and therefore experience the other modes on offer, the one I cared about was Salmon Run, which is why I went to see what Table Turf War was all about. The basic gist of it, is that it’s a card version of Turf War, you battle it out against another player to try and claim the most turf, it’s just a slower and less chaotic version of Turf War. I will be honest, I only played a few rounds of this, digital card games are not my thing at all and while I can see the appeal in this, I feel it would have been better received, if it was a game for mobile phones, rather than shoved into a game already bursting with content. With that sorted, I went into Salmon Run and apart from being told how to play the game, I was able to jump in with some randoms and enjoy many rounds. The best news for Splatoon 3 is that Salmon Run can happen anytime you want, rather than on the schedule Nintendo decided upon for Splatoon 2. The catch with this one again though, was that I was bombarded with communication errors, while not as frequent, they still happened enough to really annoy me.

After being booted out of Salmon Run for the dozenth time, I opted to venture into the stores and have a look at the goods on offer for sale. I had spent some time with Sheldon and his weapons already, which was good, but all the remaining stores, would not allow for anyone to shop there, if they were not level 4. Now that I had obtained, that very basic requirement, I was able to browse and enjoy what was on offer, though I didn’t buy anything, as I was enjoying my outfit that my Splatoon amiibo had unlocked. Early on, I did attempt to run around the plaza and visit the stores like it was real place, however I quickly realised that it was not possible to do so, simply because trying to move around there is like trying to run through molasses. In every other mode, you can get around by running, or faster still swimming in the ink you lay down, and while I can understand not letting people paint the town red, or whatever ink colour is randomly assigned, I can’t understand the reduced movement options. When you jump in the Turf War or Salmon Run modes, it is a sharp jump and you can move on, in the plaza, for some reason it feels like you are jumping with the gravity of the moon. With movement being as restricted as it was in the plaza, the menu was how I opted to get around.

There's no denying that across-the-board Splatoon is oozing charm, from the design of the apparel that you and the other citizens of the world wear, to the shops and those who operate them, charm and style are the name of the game. The game brings together a presentation package that is just beyond the edge of what we know, some elements feel very familiar like the Plaza setting, but then there are locations and objects that are so foreign, they feel alien. Yet none of these styles ever clash, the game manages to blend a multitude of colours, designs and various other aspects together to make a cohesive presentation. There are times when it falls flat, usually these are in some of the single player levels, because some of those are just platforms in a void and you really can't dress them up too much, but beyond that everything looks great.

On the sound side of things there's a good combination of interesting music, all done in that unique Splatoon style and for all the talking it's the good old gibberish speak. One of the best improvements for the game is the ability to skip the report when you turn on the game or when the maps change, there were always too long and hearing it multiple times in a session, that gibberish does get a bit much. The sounds of the city bounce around the place, making it feel larger even though it is fairly self-contained, but that is the power of sound.

Splatoon 3 is a game that is brimming with style and has potential for substance, but as the bulk of the game is reliant on servers that apparently can't handle the load at the moment, it's not a game that's fun to play. The single player is exempt from that obviously and it has some amazingly creative levels to enjoy, though the lack of a consistent narrative thread or growth in its story makes it feel less like a campaign and more like a bunch of random levels thrown together. Gating every other aspect of the game behind a minimum level shouldn’t be an issue, if players were able to get to that level, the frustration that I endured attempting to get to level 4 is not something I expected to see in a modern-day game. If you are someone who is very keen on Splatoon and you can't wait to jump in and see what this new game has to offer, all I can say is wait, until the servers get stabilised, you won't have a good time and that will mar your enjoyment of the full game.