Splatoon Raiders: Alt du trenger å vite for å komme i gang

Splatoon Raiders is out now, a Switch 2 exclusive and the first true single-player entry in Nintendo's ink-shooter series. First announced for Switch 2 back in May, it launched today, July 23, 2026, and it trades the mainline turf wars for a level-based solo campaign that pulls ideas from Splatoon 3's Salmon Run and leans closer to a looter shooter than the dungeon crawler its early trailers implied. If you are jumping in fresh, here is everything you need to know to start.

The systems are where Raiders breaks from tradition. Sub-weapons, now called gadgets, are no longer tied to your main weapon, so you can mix and match them freely. Your loadout is built around an ink tank in one of three classes, Speed, Power, and Tactical, each with its own gadgets, stats, and skill upgrades bought with tokens. More than 100 weapons drop from enemies, and mods earned on runs sharpen your gadgets further. A robot companion fights alongside you and doubles as a launchpad. Early hands-on coverage said it feels like a Nintendo looter-shooter in a good key, and these ten tips will get you raiding:

• Use your gadget the second a fight starts, then again on every cooldown. Gadgets let you mark enemies, distract them, and carve out space to reposition, and in solo play, steady gadget use is what keeps a wave from swarming you.
• Ink the ground as you move. Swimming through your own ink is faster than running, which matters in the busier late stages, and you should spray over the purple Salmonid ink, since it slows you and chips your health.
• Summon the treasure bot when you need it. Shiver, Frye, or Big Man rides along and fires on its own, but pressing X drops the bot onto nearby enemies to deal damage and pull aggro off you; it does tap out for a few seconds once it takes enough hits.
• Use that bot as a launchpad. It is built for reaching high platforms, but springing off it mid-fight lets you pick targets from above and drift back down slowly, inking Salmonids who cannot reach you.
• Play to your weapon's range. Shooters and Dualies want close to mid distance for their fast fire, while Sloshers and Chargers reward patience and spacing, so pair each weapon with a gadget that suits how it fights.
• Experiment freely. There is no penalty for switching weapons or tanks, so try everything and settle on what clicks; only mods take a little grinding to swap.
• Do not stress about grabbing everything. If you cannot reach a weapon or skip a side path, the game folds that loot into your haul at the end of the run anyway.
• Spend skill points on your current tank without worry. Upgrades like extra mod slots carry across every gadget tank you own, so you never pay the points twice when you switch classes.
• Review your gear and mods after each run. Comb through the new weapons and tank mods; a 10 percent bump to range or damage sounds minor until thirty Salmonids are bearing down on you.
• Let the game pick mods if you are stuck. Once the options pile up, Raiders can auto-select mods for you, and the system is tuned well enough that there is no harm in skipping the decision.

A quick map of what you will actually be doing helps. Missions range from linear treasure hunts to open maps where you gather a set number of Power Eggs, plus weapon-challenge levels that hand you a fixed loadout and teach a tool in context. Raids are the timed mode, floor-by-floor runs where you splat enough enemies and bank enough Eggs to advance; going after bigger Salmonids like Steel Eels and Stingers pays out more, but you still have to thin the smaller herds and keep the ground inked so you are not cornered. Sitting on top of it all are three ultimate attacks tied to the band Deep Cut, one of which calls in a shark that tears through enemies in a line.

On the social side, up to four players can raid together, and a Help feature lets you drop into someone else's game to lend a hand for rewards. Nintendo frames Raiders as a single-player Splatoon first, so there is no Salmon Run-style endless grind, but the co-op is clearly where the short, build-heavy levels are meant to sing.

Once you are comfortable, the campaign holds up. Splatoon Raiders gets first critics' reviews in the low-to-mid 80s, sitting at 80 on Metacritic and 81 on OpenCritic with about 71 percent of critics recommending it. For context, that places it just behind the mainline games, which sit at 81 to 83. The praise centers on the shooting, the co-op, and the progression loop, while the missing Turf War mode is the recurring knock. One caveat from the previews: customization leans on full outfits rather than individual clothing pieces, which feels thin for a series where assembling a look is half the point.

I play mostly for movement and systems I can tinker with, and the tank-and-mod buildcrafting here is exactly the kind of thing I would lose an evening to. The timed raids are where I would be cautious, because countdown pressure is the one mechanic that reliably turns my immersion into stress. I would boot this up with someone on the couch before grinding it alone, since the short levels read like they were built for two to four players trading complementary builds.

The timing is fitting. Raiders arrives around Splatoon's 10th Anniversary, a decade after Nintendo built the original by ignoring shooter conventions and starting from what felt fun, right down to swapping tofu-block and rabbit prototypes for squids that could swim through their own ink.

"We wanted to create a new kind of game, without worrying about trying to fit into existing game genres."

— Satoru Iwata

That instinct carries into Raiders, which reworks the formula rather than repeating it, and it lands as the Switch 2 keeps selling fast, 5.9 million units in its first year in the US, the second-fastest console start on record there. Nintendo is pitching this as a compact, standalone Splatoon rather than a live-service grind, and the buildcrafting is strong enough that it would be a surprise if a future mainline game left these systems behind.