Late last month I attended Europe’s biggest gaming expo – Euro gamer. I had attended two years before and was teased with trailers of what seemed like an incredibly fun game and instantly wanted to play it, 2 years later Nintendo finally got us a playable game to test.
Organized in 2 teams of 4 people, Nintendo was holding multiplayer Splatoon battles all day, each person was given a quick 30-second tutorial (Which you could barely hear anyway) and thrown in at the deep end.
What makes Splatoon so special?
While Splatoon is still in production and the version we played was only a developer copy, it already shows a lot of promise providing extremely smooth immersive game-play.
The queue for Splatoon at EGX 2014 was consistently long all day long and for good reason with everyone playing completely engrossed and getting excited. Having to control where your shooting by moving the controller up, down, left or right as well as moving the character through the map with the thumbsticks takes a lot of concentration but after queuing up again 4 or 5 times I finally got the hang of it and had an overwhelming blast.
Slow down, what is Splatoon about?
Splatoon is a multiplayer shoot’em up with a colourful difference that’s fun with friends or family. Each team consists of 4 players with each team representing a single colour. The objective of the game is to cover as much of the map with your ink as possible, the team with the biggest percentage of the map covered in colourful ink wins the game.
Coming from a strong on-line multiplayer gaming background, I felt Splatoon delivered something that a lot of other shooters currently don’t and have not for years…make me feel like a child.
Now don’t get me wrong, a lot of games are fun to play on-line but not on a level where they make me feel like a child again while covering the map in brightly coloured ink shouting at the screen while doing so. Sure blasting heads off is fun and full of adrenaline but nothing compares to spraying your mates with oodles of pink ink.
Splatoon, which will be available on Nintendos Wii U video gaming console in 2015, provided gripping game-play that kept us all going back for more,
I was excited when I saw the trailer at Euro Gamer Expo in 2012 and finally played it this year – I am even more excited for this game to come out and have some fun to pull out with the lads on a Sunday morning.
