The Video Game Critic

Though I definitely wish Nintendo made a more readily available demo for Splatoon, I do find it quite fun and see potential in it as a competitve shooter. To anyone who got the chance to play it, why not talk about what we liked and didn't like in our first impressions of it?

I liked:
-The creativity of the main concept, instead of Nintendo going the easy route and just making a "rack up kills to win" sort of game. You can indeed kill opponents with your weapons, but it's not necessarily essential to win.
-The tactical possibilities of being able to swim up walls your team paints, as well as using the Game Pad to jump over to where one of your teammates is.
-The style of gameplay results in teamwork being extremely important.

I didn't like:
-The game's equivalent of a sniper rifle. It's better used as a means of killing opponents rather than painting the stage (basically the opposite of the giant paint roller weapon), but there's no equivalent to a scope to make aiming more precise, so you wind up missing with it most of the time.
-As a side effect of being so reliant on teamwork, a team of three players who know what they're doing and only one player who doesn't is still almost always screwed. So far, there's no sort of system to match up players with a similar level of experience as you. And god help you if everyone on the team has a paint roller or a sniper rifle.

Some people have criticized the lack of voice chat, but I personally don't care one way or the other.

In spite of the cons, I do have faith in this shaping up to be a really fun game, and it ironically seems less casual than the gritty, realistic shooters it tries to stand out from.

I played the first session. I slept through the other two sessions though. I would have liked to have played them because I had a lot of fun. I don't understand why they only made it available for 3 specific hours. Maybe they could have made it so that you had a limited amount of time or a limited amount of online matches per day and you had a limited amount of days to play it. Or they could have let you play through one or two levels of the single-player mode. The way they did it just seems way too limited. But I guess it did what a demo should do because now I'm more excited for it than I was before.

As for the game itself, I liked it. It started off with a tutorial but it actually didn't suck. It didn't drag on longer than it needed to. It didn't treat me like an idiot that doesn't know what a video game is and it was actually a great way to get used to the gyroscope controls. A feature that I wasn't looking forward to. But it didn't take long to get used to and now I really like the controls. Despite my usual aversion to shooters, I actually did pretty well in the matches that I played. I was on the winning team more often than I was on the losing team. I came in second place on my team every time we won, oddly enough. With two exceptions. Once, I was in last place and once I came in first. Whenever I ended up on the losing team, I didn't get upset. I didn't even care. I was just having too much fun.

Pros
-Swimming in your ink is really fun, especially when you use it to jump between platforms. It's kind of exhilarating.
-The tutorial was short, sweet, and unobtrusive.
-Squid Jump, though not a great mini-game was still fun to play while waiting for the real game to load.
-No voice chat. Yep, I call that a pro. I always hated listening people talk during games like TF2 while I'm just trying to play. I'm glad Nintendo left it out.

Cons
-eneuman, I agree with you about the sniper rifle. It just didn't spread enough ink like the other weapons. Maybe when I get the full game, I'll try and get used to it but since I only had an hour to play I immediately switched to another weapon.
-Though I enjoyed the roller weapon, I didn't find it very useful for climbing walls.
-Some of the super weapons, I didn't find too exciting. I'm talking specifically about the ones where you just throw a bunch of bombs.

I had a lot of fun with it. I'll definitely pick it up eventually. And to everyone whining about Nintendo not making any new IPs. Here you go. It'll be here at the end of the month.

Mostly, I'm glad to see Nintendo making their own kind of game for an established genre. It's like paintball on crack.

I had fun trying to cover the arena in ink, though it was kind of a drag to get that mission six battles in a row. My team only won a few times and it was all cover the arena missions. The mini-game on the touch pad was fun though too reminiscent of Doodle Jump. Still, it's a nice bonus while waiting for a battle.

One issue for me is the camera. There should be an optional camera control independent of aiming, though the camera should be able to move with the aim as well.