My Time With Splatoon’s Global Testfire

I took part in the Testfire Demo for Nintendo’s new shooter. Here are my thoughts:

1. The motion controls are dreadful. It made me sick to move my character at the same time I moved my controller. Trying to use any weapon, save the Splat-Roller, was impossible with motion on. Luckily, you can switch it to normal controls. Someone needs to tell Nintendo that moving the Gamepad like a camera is NOT fun. It’s frustrating.

splatoon inkling

2. The Inkling/Squid’s jump is useless. Honestly, it needs to be 3 times as high as it is. I couldn’t even get up the side of a ramp with the jump. It was pathetic. As soon as I figured out that the jump is useless, I started to win. Just keep rolling and never jump.

3. Why is it possible to fall off the platforms? Who designed it like that? Shooters are not supposed to be about staying on platforms. Save the platforming sections for single player.

4. Swimming up walls needs some serious work. Unless you 100% cover an entire wall, your squid will just begin flailing around uselessly until you give up and fall. I recommend changing it so that if your squid jumps while going straight up a wall, he gets a boost so that he can bypass a short hop up onto a wall. That, or just make the ink shots cover more of the walls when they hit. I once cornered a squid up a wall. I had my roller down below him. He had nothing to do but drop and die, but he just sat up there flailing. I just waited for him to fall and die, and he did.

5. Only the Splat-Roller is even an option, at the moment. I realize that there are four guns in the demo, and that there will be more in the full game, but the Splat-Roller was totally overpowered. I suspect the reason is that it is extremely difficult to aim any of the other guns, but it is easy to roll over people. I won almost every game I played, getting the top score, as soon as I began using the roller. I suggest giving the Splat Shooters more range/faster shots, and giving the Charger gun more of an area-of-effect when it launches.

6. Aiming is not good. It’s hard to be accurate, even with motion-control off.

7. I hate how many of the ledges are “non climbable.” I don’t understand why one of the coolest ideas—swimming up walls—is limited so frequently. Many of the ledges, even ledges where one is allowed to be on/paint, have black-and-yellow police tape on them which keeps you from swimming up over them, even if they are 100% painted. I don’t understand why they have this. The one factory-like map had the most of it. For some reason, Nintendo wants us to use these two ramps rather than swim up the walls. It makes no sense. Take down the police tape.

8. 4 on 4 is really limited gameplay. I wish it were more players with bigger maps.

9. Nintendo doesn’t do dedicated servers; Nintendo relies on everyone’s connections being perfectly compatible. For this reason, several of my games dropped for player-to-player connection issues (not because of my Internet, trust me).
10. I like being able to jump across the map and help people on the front lines. That was the coolest feature.

11. Spawn-camping was easy on the factory map. I held up the entire other team with my Splat-Roller and grenades while the rest of my team painted the entire map. I wish there was more than one spawn-location.

splatoon inkling

12. My favorite thing to do in the beginning was instantly turn into a squid and ride out as far as I could, or follow behind someone else with a Splat-Roller.

13. I wish there was voice chat. I want to talk with the gaming community.

14. I wish Nintendo had a unified achievements system.

15. If two Splat-Rollers run into each other, pick one and kill them, Nintendo. When you kill both, nobody wins and that’s no fun.

16. Finally, I hate that I’m stuck with one set of weapons for an entire match. Why not be able to change out when you die? Allow users to build a couple of pre-sets, and then pick when they die. Not that anyone would ever switch from the Splat-Roller, since it’s the only weapon that is any good.

I’m probably not sold on this game. It’s fun in some ways, but not as fun as games like Fat Princess. If it were on Playstation 4, I’d probably go for it since the multiplayer userbase would be bigger, there would be dedicated servers, voice chat, and trophies to collect. Right now, it’s like going to a laser tag arena. It seems like it would be fun once and awhile, but not something I would get deep into.