What's the first thing that pops into your head if you think of team based online shooters? If you answered "guns, meatheads and the colour grey", then your thinking is most likely in tune with ours - but it seems in Japan, word association works differently. For when Nintendo started coming up with ideas for their own take on an already crowded genre, the first ideas to pop into their heads weren't to do with guns, camouflage and "visceral" violence - instead, they were thinking of squids. And tentacles. As always.
But Splatoon is no ordinary third person shooter. This is a game that takes what's always been a hardcore genre, and turns it on its head, with a unique control scheme that focusses on accessibility, and a style of play that rewards people not for killing the other team, but for painting the town red, or green, or blue, or pink, depending on your squid's colour of ink.
As with Mario Maker and Project Giant Robot, we got to go hands (or perhaps tentacles) on with Splatoon at a recent event, as we took over the slippery controls a half squid, half human girl. Armed with a super soaker style ink cannon (because spraying it naturally would be, well, weird), it's up to you to soak as much of the floor as possible with your team's colour of ink. With two teams of four facing off across a fairly sizeable level, it's a pretty unique concept - but the ink is much more than just a unique way to tell who's winning at a glance.
This is the most colourful shooter you'll ever see.
Stand above a patch of your-team's colour of ink and press the right trigger, and you'll transform into a squid, splatting down to the ground to become one with the squelchy puddle. While you can't shoot in squid form (no arms, see?), you can use your team's ink to dash across the map, using the channels of pink/blue goo as a kind of high speed squiddy swimming pool. Not only does swimming in squid mode let you cover more ground, faster than you would on foot, but it also makes you harder to hit - and, if you've sprayed your goo in right places, can even let you reach areas that you otherwise couldn't reach. Splat your ink up a wall, or through one of the mesh fences that segment the level, and you'll be able to swim vertically up the wall, or pass under the fence, which at the very least gets you a better vantage point - and may even let you access an area that the other team has yet to discover.
Armed with an ink gun, which you can use to either spray the way in front of you, or splat the other players (it is possible to kill the other players if you hit them enough, but getting more kills than everyone else doesn't mean you'll win), it's perhaps a bit surprising that, despite being a squid, you haven't actually got an unlimited supply of ink. Spray too much, and you'll need to recharge by diving into the nearest bit of same-coloured ink, lying low until someone wanders past, when you can pop up and let 'em have it.
Of course, ink isn't always a unanimous help. Should you come across goo from the other team, it can actually be a pretty major hindrance, as even moving through it slows you to a crawl. It's a strategy you find people using a lot during a game - if they see you, and fancy getting an easy kill, they can spray the area around your feet first, practically sticking you to the spot, making it tricky for you to get away, and effectively turning you into a sitting duck.
Judging by the screens, there will be extra weapons available, although we're not sure how you get them...
However, despite a few annoying strategies, it's clear that a lot of work's gone into making this a game that everyone can play, even if you've never really played a team based shooter before. There's no confusing classes, no unlockable abilities in sight, and as of yet, not even any weapon power ups to collect, making each game in Splatoon a level playing field between two teams of evenly matched players. And when it comes to online games, that's what really matters.
Even the control scheme isn't what you'd usually expect from a third person shooter. Knowing controls can be one of the more intimidating parts of games like this, Splatoon adopts a unique set-up that isn't quite a dual analogue scheme - while the left analogue stick controls your camera, you can actually play the game without even touching the one on the right, making use of the GamePad's tilt sensors to control your view instead. While it's a bit trickier looking left and right like this, as you need to move around quite a lot alter your view, tilting the GamePad is actually the only way to look up and down, with the right analogue stick only able to rotate the camera left and right. But it works - and it works really well!
It's not the only way the GamePad comes in handy, either. Throughout the game, an isometric map of the level will be displayed on the GamePad screen, giving you a real time update of who's winning, and letting you see any areas your enemies have missed, or anywhere they're particularly strong, letting you easily figure out where to go next. What's more, if you find yourself away from the action, all you need to do is poke one of your fellow players on the map to automatically rocket yourself to them. It's a really handy feature for teaming up with friends again - and something that means your whole team can easily regroup should you come under attack.
As with everything else we saw, though, Splatoon clearly has a long way to go before release. Thankfully, however, it's got a pretty strong base to start from, and the developers seem to be moving everything in the right direction. Seeing as online games will always have a limited shelf life (especially on the Wii U, where if your name isn't Mario Kart, no-one plays you online), the folks over at Nintendo are hard at work on a single player component for the game - and, perhaps most importantly, split-screen. While this has been described as "one-on-one split screen", and not the four player "us vs the world" set up we were hoping for, we'll be keeping our fingers crossed that Nintendo can pull off the impossible, and make a third person shooter that we'd actually want to play online. They're already half way there.
