the main thing i care about in any game is obviously the gameplay, and i really enjoy actually playing the game here. fun variety of characters (soa the best though), solid maps, decent modes, and pretty fun visually. the biggest thing this game does that hooked me when i played the open beta was the way you get kills or saves on your teammates. when someone loses all of their health they get turned into a huge foam ball and you have to slide into them to finish that kill (or wait 5ish seconds and it'll do it itself) but a teammate can show up and slide into them and save them. it creates a really fun and chaotic sense of trying to finish a kill or save a teammate! it's super satisfying to catch a teammate that got sent flying towards a wall and save them left second. it feels great to get kills or save your team, and is by far the most addicting part.

i do have a lot of problems outside of the actual multiplayer game part though. as much as i think it's fun the main thing keeping my star rating pretty low, is like everything else aside from the main multiplayer game is kinda just shit. even the main game, the servers are a bit wonky and i've had server crashes a couple times. i also just wish there was an easy requeue option after a game. the monetization is pretty awful as well, super overpriced skins and such. the bubble gem mechanic is weird and shitty as well, and the single player missions are all identical empty rectangle wave defense missions. they're okay for learning the gimmicks of each character and the strengths of each ability but not every character even has missions and they're still just really boring. it also does the lame splatoon thing where modes are on timers and cycle out, which doesn't feel as shit here as splatoon since it's a quick cycle and the co-op modes aren't locked behind it, but still just lame. let me play what i wanna play!

i think it's fair to have had a weird/negative opinion of this game on reveal, even after playing it i'm not surprised that it isn't clicking with people but man am i really fuckin enjoying my time with this game right now! i was not at all expecting that, like most people i thought "lol splatoon on playstation" and i don't even like splatoon, at least the multiplayer so i had pretty low expectations. i was very surprised that i ended up having a great time, and also it differentiates itself from splatoon a good bit in the gameplay. it's a bit of a shame it'll hold that comparison over itself til the end of time, and i can't particularly blame people for making it either because even if the gameplay isn't as samey a lot of the systems and style sure is, but it's still a bummer.