Nintendo's ink revolution has its newest regiment deployed. Splatoon Raiders launched July 23 exclusively for Switch 2, and it's something the series has never been: a proper single-player-focused action-adventure expansion of the Splatoon universe, built for hardware that can finally render ink bleed at full frame rate.
Nintendo telegraphed this one long. Announced in the big June Direct, it got its own dedicated mini-Direct on June 30 that finally explained how the structure works — Splatoon's familiar movement, ink-swimming and turf-painting grammar, stretched over objectives, bosses and campaign exploration instead of the third-person shooter arena loop. The mission architecture leans more closely on single-player campaigns like the Octo Expansion that fans canonized, and extrapolates it to something bigger.
Early reviews are solid: aggregates in the low-to-mid 80s, with praise for how the studio successfully stretched the series' agonizingly brilliant traversal-and-painting systems into a deeper adventure, and nitpicks mostly around pacing plateau mid-campaign. Nothing about it suggests Nintendo was careless in transplanting its multiplayer darling into a solo frame.
The more interesting frame is the console year itself: between Star Fox last month, Yoshi in May, Raiders now, and the promised Zelda Ocarina of Time remake still landing sometime later in 2026, the Switch 2's sophomore catalogue is looking like one of Nintendo's all-time arrangement strengths. This is what it looks like when the launch year afterglow actually converts into a schedule.
Splatoon's single-player pivot is gold. Ink-color Raiders, signed Fresh Squid.