Splatoon Raiders: Critics Split 2/5 to 9/10 as Nintendo Ships Day-One Patch
Splatoon Raiders is now in players’ hands on Nintendo Switch 2, and the conversation around Nintendo’s first single-player-focused entry in the franchise has split sharply down the middle. While the game’s aggregate scores of 80 on OpenCritic and 81 on Metacritic put it roughly level with the numbered trilogy, individual reviews range from perfect 10s to a two-star pan from The Guardian, and Nintendo has already pushed a day-one patch to smooth out bugs and audio issues.
The game drops the series’ signature Turf War multiplayer in favour of a loot-driven action shooter. Players take on the role of a mechanic working with Deep Cut, a trio of swashbuckling musicians, customising their character and gear while taking on waves of enemy Salmonids as they raid the islands for treasure. Nintendo’s own product page frames the pitch simply: venture into the mysterious Spirhalite Islands in search of treasure, customise your character, and kit yourself out with mechanical gadgets and ink-flinging weapons.
Metacritic Sits at 81, But The Guardian Gives It Two Stars
Reviews landed roughly two days ahead of release with the game sitting at an 80 on OpenCritic and an 81 on Metacritic, according to TheGamer’s tracking of the aggregate scores. That places Raiders squarely alongside the series’ historically consistent critical reception, with the original Splatoon scoring an 81, its sequel an 83, and Splatoon 3 another 83.
Not every reviewer agreed the format shift paid off. IGN awarded the game a strong score, while The Guardian was thoroughly unimpressed with what the new Nintendo game has to offer, giving it just two stars out of a possible five. GameDaily’s round-up of the reviews summed up the divide bluntly, noting reviews landed around 80 on Metacritic, but the spread runs from IGN’s 9/10 to The Guardian’s two stars.
Giant Bomb, Metro GameCentral Flag Boss Fights and Fatigue
Beyond the headline scores, the mid-tier reviews offer the most texture on what’s actually working and what isn’t. GameDaily highlighted Giant Bomb’s 3.5 out of 5 as the most instructive score in the set, because the reviewer plainly enjoyed playing it and still finished without much desire to continue, crediting a meaty campaign and substantial post-game content before landing on the observation that having had fun, they had also simply had enough, with boss fights leaning on damage sponges rather than puzzles.
Metro GameCentral’s 6 out of 10 called it slight and unnecessary, a diversion that makes the wait for a mainline sequel harder rather than easier, while Gamereactor found it addictive but stopped short of calling it the definitive single-player Splatoon, with The Guardian’s two stars sitting at the far end, describing a game it found pedestrian. The split isn’t purely about quality, either — much of the criticism centres on the loss of competitive Turf War itself rather than execution of the new loot loop.
Nintendo Ships a Day-One Update With Bug Fixes and Music Adjustments
Alongside the review discourse, Nintendo Life reported that Nintendo shipped a launch update for the Switch 2 this week, and like many other first-party Nintendo releases nowadays, there’s a launch update, with the Japanese patch notes detailing adjustments as well as bug fixes to improve the overall game experience. Nintendo’s Japanese notes specify the tweaks in more granular terms: the team adjusted the music played in some scenes, fixed several bugs to improve the gameplay experience, and confirmed the latest update data is required to play the online features.
Nintendo Life also noted a compatibility catch worth flagging for anyone playing offline with friends before updating: downloading the update data to the latest version will disable local communication and LAN play with previous versions. English-language patch notes had not gone live at the time of Nintendo Life’s report, though the studio’s pattern of quick day-one fixes on Switch 2 first-party titles is well established.
Ten Million Sold Twice Over Sets the Bar for a Sequel
Whether Raiders becomes a recurring sub-series rather than a one-off experiment may come down to numbers rather than review scores. TheGamer pointed out that the real test lies ahead: the other, arguably more important, piece of the puzzle that will need to fall into place is sales, since Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3 both comfortably cleared ten million sold, and while Raiders as a spinoff might not be expected to perform to quite that level, Nintendo will likely want the game to sell at least five million if there’s any chance of a sequel.
That stacks Raiders’ commercial expectations on top of its critical ones. Scoring within a few points of the mainline trilogy gives Nintendo a green light on quality, but converting Switch 2 owners — including those in Australia and New Zealand where the console and its exclusives have been driving hardware demand through 2026 — into buyers of a spin-off without the series’ trademark competitive hook is the harder sell that will decide Raiders’ long-term future.
Read also: Splatoon Raiders Launches on Switch 2 With 9/10 Scores From Nintendo Life, IGN
