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Is Splatoon a shooter or isn't it? There's been a lot of discussion about where exactly Nintendo's new Wii U exclusive - the first all-new character-led IP to emerge from within the company for 14 long years - fits, but in truth it defies easy categorisation. Yes there are guns, though they're employed in a different kind of wet-work: one that sees splashes of vivid, bright colour sloshed all over the stages. There's competitive online play at its heart as well, though success isn't measured in how many headshots you pop off but in how much colour you bring to the world, and how successful you are in spreading that thick, sloppy ink. This is new territory for the company, for sure, but the one thing that's evident throughout Splatoon is that, despite the lack of familiar faces, it's every inch a Nintendo game.It's a machine for happiness, in other words, where each element has been engineered to elicit a smile. Nintendo's games have always held fun at a premium, of course, but given a blank piece of paper it's fascinating to see how far its developers go in energetically providing colour of their own. Splatoon is a giddy, at times delirious game.
It's chaotic, too. The Turf War battles that are the default online mode see two teams of four face off against each other from opposite sides of the map, working to paint as much of the floor as possible in their own ink. At the end of each match, the amount of territory is totted up, and a winner is declared. It's scrappy and it's simple, and it speaks to a pleasure as primal as that found in other online shooters, even if it's more overtly juvenile: this isn't about bloodlust, and it's only nominally about a sense of conquest. Predominantly, Splatoon is all about creating a big, gaudy mess.
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