With the release of Nintendo’s new IP Splatoon, it only seems right to discuss what I’ve learnt from the two instances of the Global Testfire demo made playable on the 9th and 23rd of May. Before diving into certain aspects of the game for those unaware it only seems right to explain what Splatoon actually is.
The second type (which I haven’t played) named Splat Zones is a king of the hill styled game where teams attempt to control a designated area by keeping it covered in their team’s ink. There’s also local multiplayer as well as a single player campaign however I’ll not bore you with the many details. Jumping back to May 9th when the Global Testfire launched I was eager to give Nintendo’s new franchise a go as information revealed and how well it was received when unveiled gave me hope of an exciting new game to own for the Wii U. To begin you start with a tutorial (which can be skipped) explaining the controls and so on. Though it became very apparent early on that using the built in gyroscope to assist with aiming was completely alien, it took me a few matches before I was able to use it effectively though I’m still not sold on the idea. Fortunately, though unaware at the time, this feature can be disabled and players can just use the analogue stick for aiming however I’ve not given up on the use of the gyroscope.
Initially I forgot the idea was to cover as much of the map as possible in ink and naturally proceeded to do what you do in every online shooter and kill enemies, though as I remembered what I was supposed to do I genuinely had an enjoyable time playing an online shooter (which is rare) as it just felt somewhat refreshing to many other online shooters that saturate consoles. While I would like to continue to praise Splatoon when it came to second time to play the Global Testfire on the 23rd of May, and somehow convinced myself to stop play The Witcher III for an hour, all was not well. Initially a game was found straight away but after ten minutes of the game attempting to find other people to play against nothing was happening. There’s also no button to go back, pressing the home button wasn’t even a viable option, I had to turn off the Wii U. My later attempts were just met with various error codes, servers being too full and after a good fifty minutes I decided to call it a night.
Full Review Next Week!
See you then!