If you think of fast-paced, intense shooters, you might think of games like Call of Duty, Overwatch, or Valorant. However, very few people think of Nintendo games. Shooter expert and MeinMMO author Marko Jevtic wants to change that. Because he says: The best shooter of the year will be the colorful Switch game Splatoon 3.

I love fast movement, a ridiculous number of weapons, and fast-paced action with a lot of strategic depth – these are exactly the things I love in multiplayer shooters. If a short time-to-kill with special abilities that allow for unique strategies is added, I am completely in love.

There may be many shooters on the market that have all that, but they all lack something.

• Call of Duty has fast-paced action and many weapons, but zero teamwork or strategy.
• Valorant is very strategic, but you should never shoot and run at the same time.
• Overwatch offers a lot of teamwork with dozens of abilities, but individual strengths can often get completely lost.
• Halo Infinite has unique and great gunplay, but hardly any content.
• Battlefield 2042 is… Battlefield 2042.

All of these games are a lot of fun in their own way. But none of them can keep me hooked for years. After a maximum of 100 – 200 hours of gameplay, I’ve had enough and look for the next shooter that offers me a month of fun.

This is how it goes almost every year for me. But there were two major exceptions. In 2015, Splatoon was released on the Wii U, and in 2017, its sequel came to the Switch. On September 9, 2022, Splatoon 3 will finally be released, and for me, it’s already clear:

Splatoon 3, the colorful children’s game for the Nintendo Switch, will be the best shooter of the year. Especially for fans of competitive shooting games.

Splatoon 3 hides a hardcore shooter under bright colors

The Splatoon games have sold over 17 million copies. Thus, they are secretly a really big franchise that hardly gets noticed by so-called hardcore gamers. 

The reason for this is obvious. While the Splatoon games are shooters, they come from the family-friendly developer Nintendo – it’s even the team behind Animal Crossing. Children aged 6 and older are allowed to play these shooting games according to the USK, and instead of firing high-caliber lead bullets from military weapons, you shoot colorful ink blobs from water guns or oversized paintbrushes.

And yet, Splatoon is a real shooting game for the hardest shooter fans like me: 

• It has small playable figures that move incredibly fast, making precise aiming difficult.
• The time-to-kill is rapid, rewarding both good movement and good aim.
• The weapon balancing is incredibly good, even though Splatoon 2 boasts 108 weapons in 9 categories (via Inkipedia).
• Many different special abilities and ultimates like rocket launchers, grappling hooks or controllable robot spiders provide strategic options and promote teamwork.
• There are complex loadouts thanks to gear buffs, which allow for faster movement, higher resistances, or better sneaking.
• The color mechanics make map control and good positioning incredibly important (more on that later).

Additionally, Splatoon does not have aim assist thanks to motion controls via gyro-aiming. Just because of that, this “children’s game” from Nintendo requires more shooter skill than console shooters for “real men” like CoD or Battlefield.

In the gameplay video for Splatoon 3, you can see what it looks like in motion:

In addition to these refined shooter basics, with which Splatoon does not need to hide from any competition, it also has a few unique gameplay tricks up its sleeve. They all revolve around the color mechanics. Because the color in Splatoon is not only a graphical trademark, the whole gameplay is designed around it. 

In Splatoon, you play as so-called Inklings – creatures that can transform from a human form into that of an octopus at the press of a button.

As a human, you can shoot, throw grenades, and jump, but not much more. As an octopus, you can swim almost completely flat, which offers several advantages: 

• You reload your ammunition.
• You are hard to hit and virtually invisible when moving slowly.
• You can swim quickly across the map or up walls.

All of this only applies when you are in your team’s color.

Each shot from your weapons fires ink that sticks to the map – whether along floors or up walls. Through your team color, you can easily navigate as a human or octopus – however, opponent’s color sticks to your feet like super glue and damages you. 

The aim is to let more of the map shine in your color than the opponents’. Colors easily overlap one another. You do not win the main game mode by kills, but by having more of your color on the map than the opposing team.

Thus, there is always a tug-of-war for map control, which opens up numerous strategic possibilities in the game. 

In summary, Splatoon 3 is one of the fastest, most strategic, and most unique shooters on the market. With its colorful presentation, it appeals to a younger audience, but even shooter veterans with calloused trigger fingers will find it thoroughly enjoyable. 

How good and deep the gameplay systems in Splatoon 3 are is particularly evident in the excellent ranked mode. It is among the best on the market – despite and thanks to Nintendo’s notoriously strict limitations on online multiplayer.

Splatoon is the best competitive shooter for those without a team

The big shooter franchises often place great importance on ranked game modes. In special modes, you are supposed to play against other gamers who are roughly at the same level. 

The more games you win, the faster you improve in the rankings, and the better the rank you have. Gold, platinum, master – the hunt for the better title is at least theoretically very enticing.

Unfortunately, this is almost never the case for me in practice. The games I love are only played by a few of my friends. Plus, most of my friends play significantly worse than I do. That is usually not a problem – except in ranked mode, where they sometimes cannot even play with me.

Additionally, almost all big shooter games have an unbearably toxic community. It can be so unbearable at times that I completely lose the desire to play these shooters in any competitive form. And without that constant incentive to climb ranks, I quickly lose interest in the game as well. 

Here, however, Nintendo’s lackluster online system is actually a blessing. Matches in Splatoon are split into 2 types:

• With one or 3 other friends in a team.
• In 2 teams of 4 mixed individual players.

The first match type allows communication via the Nintendo Online App or classics like Discord because you are playing with friends. This is perfect for those who want coordinated team play with their colleagues. 

In the second match type, however, each player ends up alone in a team of other individual players who have no way of communicating with one another.

This is – probably unintentionally – brilliant, especially for solo players. Because each ranked game guarantees no communication between players, each match is completely fair. Because you never fight against a full team, but only against other solo players. And teabagging is the only possible form of toxic communication.

For good teamwork, you must intuitively and spontaneously function with complete strangers – those who can do that deserve the victory. If teamwork doesn’t go smoothly, you can still decide the match for the team as a solo player.

Splatoon rewards individual skills as a shooter player much more than any other shooter on the market. Those who are instinctively good at gaming and can cooperate with others win more games in Splatoon. That’s how it should always be. Because nothing feels worse than playing well alone but losing against a completely coordinated team of worse players.

And for those solo players who sometimes want to play ranked with friends, there’s no need to worry – the team ranking is separate and reset multiple times a day so that you can find fair matches in always new constellations. This is a perfect system for people like me.

There is no other shooter like Splatoon 3, and none better

At first glance, Splatoon 3 hardly looks different from its predecessors, but it doesn’t have to. The last part came out in 2017, and 5 years later, the gameplay could be exactly the same, and I would still be happy – because there is no other game on the market that packages such unique gameplay so well.

But that doesn’t mean that Splatoon 3 is a pure copy of Splatoon 2: Despite some similarities, experts are discovering many exciting new features (via YouTube):

• Completely new special abilities with a lot of strategic potential.
• Even faster gameplay thanks to new spawn mechanics and more aggressive weapon loadouts.
• Special evasive maneuvers that temporarily make you (almost) invulnerable.
• A completely new weapon type and new maps.

Thus, Splatoon 3 is well on its way to being the best multiplayer shooter of 2022. Personally, I can’t imagine that any other game can top it this year. 

• Overwatch 2 makes a great impression in beta, but it is far less beginner-friendly than Splatoon and has a very toxic community in ranked mode. It may even come out in 2023.
• The Cycle: Frontier is an exciting “casual alternative” to Escape from Tarkov, but it is not a true deathmatch shooter. In some matches, you might not even see a human opponent.
• CoD Modern Warfare 2 now officially has a name, but it certainly will not reinvent the shooter wheel. Additionally, the franchise has never had a particularly good ranked mode.

These are, of course, only the most notable releases we can expect this year. If you want to be reminded of which other shooters are coming this year, I recommend this article:

New Multiplayer Shooters 2022: The Most Important Releases for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch

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