Splatoon 3 puts online play, fashion, and hair front and center
Despite feeling uncannily similar to play as past installments, Splatoon 3 is packed with smart changes and updates that will likely lead to people — or at least, me — keeping the game in rotation for much longer than before. I got to play over an hour of the game’s various modes ahead of its September 9th launch, including just a few levels of the main story, a few rounds of Salmon Run (the game’s surprisingly difficult but rewarding horde mode), and Turf War (Splatoon’s take on a four-versus-four deathmatch).
You’ll notice a welcome quality-of-life change right when you boot it up. Instead of being forced to sit through an intro presentation of the latest announcements for in-game activities each time you restart the game, as past Splatoon games have done, you’ll be able to simply click the left stick to listen to the dispatch as you do other activities.
Multiplayer is where most of the game’s biggest changes are easy to spot, though they might not seem that big of a deal if you’ve played other modern multiplayer shooters. For instance, the Salmon Run mode, which supports four online players to survive as long as possible against waves of enemies and bosses, can now be initiated at any time. In Splatoon 2, the mode was available only at select times. You’d be forgiven for never having tried it before since it’s inconvenient to schedule your life around when a feature is available. There seems to be a lot of added variety here in terms of enemy types and new random events to keep it exciting.
Right before loading into either a game of Salmon Run or Turf War, you’ll land in a shooting range — one of Splatoon 3’s features that I’m most excited about. As the game works out the connectivity, and as everyone gets their
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