The game itself is okay at best and yet still every step you have to take to actually play it is completely obnoxious. The menus hurt to look at and even more so to actually navigate, everything in them costs exorbitant amounts of money, and after every single multiplayer round you get pulled out of the lobby and are shown the battle pass because why haven’t you spent money on the battle pass yet? Don’t you want Snoop Dogg? Don’t you want the funny kill effect where it turns dead body ragdolls into really funny and epic marijuana joints? Make sure to buy them now or you’ll miss out!

Edit: Just played through the campaign. It was sort of like that video of a guy removing a screw from a metal hole, welding the hole shut, sanding it down, making a new hole in the exact same spot, threading it, and putting the screw back in.

It's alright. At its core it's clearly meant to be a sort of zen game where you just relax and take in the sights/sounds while riding the bike, and I appreciate that about it. It's definitely my favorite part of the game. That said, my biggest issues come when attempting to complete the various challenges, which are required to unlock mountains, trails, bikes, etc. Once there were actual stakes such as completing trails within a certain amount of time or with a limited number of crashes allowed, there were so many small annoyances that really added up and bothered me while playing, primarily how janky the bike controls sometimes and how easy it is to crash.

Not bad, not great. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the Remedy games I’ve played up to this point but this one is easily the weakest. It’s kinda difficult to follow the story as it barely makes sense, and making half of it a loosely related series of live-action “TV episodes” was a questionable choice that did not really aid my confusion. The gameplay at the very least is pretty enjoyable. It is mostly a standard third-person shooter but I did think the time powers were a pretty fun way to make it a bit more interesting.

I feel weird rating this one because I feel extremely different between the single-player campaign and the multiplayer, so I'll start off by saying:

Single-player: 9/10
Multiplayer: 4/10

The Splatoon 3 single-player campaign is everything I was hoping for and more. It greatly expands the story potential for Splatoon in a way that was unprecedented considering how bare bones it was in the first two games. The Octo Expansion in Splatoon 2 was also amazing for this reason. Splatoon 3 manages to incorporate all of the best parts of the Octo Expansion into its own campaign while also staying fresh and interesting. It's awesome exploring Alterna and unlocking all the levels with Little Buddy, the levels are some of the best in all of the Splatoon games with some serious challenges, the boss fights are a joy, all of the music is great, and everything comes together in the final sequence which ends up being one of the best experiences I have ever had the pleasure of playing through in a video game.

Multiplayer is uh... a different beast. To be blunt, I do not like it. Right off the bat the online connectivity is a major downgrade from the first two games, and this is a series that is already known for its shoddy online connectivity. Half of the time I get splatted I never even see what hit me, and half of the time I shoot somebody enough to splat them, they stay standing. I've been playing these games since the release of the first one in 2015, and I'll reiterate, it has definitely never been perfect, but it also has never been as bad as it is in this entry.

The new stages are not especially interesting, and the stages that were fun in 1&2 have been redesigned beyond recognition. They basically remove as much verticality as possible, and make stages smaller. Flounder Heights was my favorite stage in Splatoon 1 and when playing it in Splatoon 3 I forget I'm even there. The buildings are half the size and it feels like there are only two viable paths between the bases. Another horror story is the sad state of Hammerhead Bridge. In Splatoon 1 the entire appeal of that stage was how there were two levels, upper and lower. The lower level was the main part of the stage where all the ink coverage occurred, and the upper level was a catwalk you could access that made you vulnerable, but was worth using because it allowed you to sneak past enemy players and flank them if you were skilled enough. In Splatoon 3 the entire stage is just a single path with no catwalk to speak of. I understand that the lore explanation for this is that the bridge construction is complete (as it was under construction in Splatoon 1), but that doesn't make it more fun to play on.

Splatoon 3 by far has the worst specials of the three games. Most of the specials worth using are either reused from 2 or are watered down versions of specials from 1. The Triple Inkstrike is nice but it pales in comparison to the war-ending nuke that is the original Inkstrike. The Killer Wail 5.1 doesn't instill the deep primal fear that the original Killer Wail does when you see the outline of its path manifesting around you. The Tenta Missiles and Ink Storm are reused and unchanged from Splatoon 2, you get the point. Of the specials introduced in this game, the only two I can really think of that are genuinely great are the Zipcaster and the Crab Tank.

A few more minor points:

- Multiplayer music is good, but it does feel a bit repetitive a lot of the time because there isn't a huge selection. Splatoon 1 still has my favorite multiplayer soundtrack but I don't hold that against this game.
- Matchmaking still takes way too long but it's a Splatoon game so what else is new.
- Locker customization is really fun and the amount of freedom you are given is quite surprising. I love that adding physical objects such as weapons and clothing is physics based, makes it feel more tangible. I also enjoy being able to see the lockers of other players, especially friends.
- Name tag customization is also really nice and I especially like the titles you can give yourself.
- I think having seasons is the right move considering it's what every other major multiplayer game is doing. Feels nice to know that there are updates being released on a consistent schedule and it's not up in the air like it was in 1&2.
- I have mixed feelings about Splatfest. There being three teams is a fun idea that works with the theme of the game but Shiver wins literally every single time even when it seems obvious she shouldn't. I think Big Man has won maybe twice and I cannot recall Frye winning more than once.
- Tricolor Turf War during Splatfests is fun but very difficult to win as an attacking team.
- Salmon Run is very fun still, and is greatly improved. The addition of King Salmonids seems like a no-brainer and I love how dire the tone is when they appear. It's exhilarating fighting them but admittedly I have yet to actually defeat one (skill issue).
- Big Run is another awesome addition that is fun to play, and again I love the tone that is set with it being presented as a legitimate emergency. Worth mentioning it is quite noticeable how much the game struggles to maintain 60fps with so many Salmonids running around on the larger maps, but at this point in time that is a problem with the Switch hardware, not the game itself.
- I have no issues with the general gameplay or the weapons/sub weapons. Inkling movement, shooting, throwing sub weapons, swimming, jumping, etc. all feel the same as they always have but a bit more refined, which is all good.

Splatoon 1 is tied with Mirror's Edge as my favorite game of all time so I say all of this out of love. I adore this series and I want to see it continue and flourish even though this particular entry is not the best as I see it.

Pretty good! Took me a while to get through it since I got sidetracked with some other things, but eventually I sat down and tried to commit harder to it and finally finished the whole thing. The story was a lot of fun, there were a lot of silly moments as much as there were impactful ones, the music was great, and it does turn-based gameplay in a way that doesn't put me to sleep. I do think it was a bit too easy, I basically plowed through most of the bosses and mini bosses on normal difficulty. The performance also dipped here and there for seemingly no reason, and some of the cutscenes had very strange sound mixing where it felt like a lot of sound effects were just absent. None of this ruins the game, but did raise an eyebrow. I'm interested in checking out the post-game, but I'll save that for when I have spare bits of time here and there.

The game itself seems fine but this remaster is totally broken. There are an absurd amount of visual bugs such as black bars, flashing lights, distorted polygons, and god knows what else beyond the two hours I was willing to subject myself to. Enemy ragdolls are also completely missing and instead they just freeze in whatever pose they were in when you shot them and float off into the sky. I'm just glad I got this for free with Alan Wake II. Gonna go check out the original instead.

Side note but the Epic Games overlay wins the award for most intrusive and annoying achievement notification ever designed.

There are the makings of a fantastic game in here, I truly do mean that. The physics of sledding/skiing/flying/etc. feel great, the world is huge, and the ragdoll physics when you wipe out are really fun. However, I should have known better than to trust it, being a Ubisoft title. It's always online, and impossible to play any objectives/races/etc without being connected, so anything in the game that isn't free roam essentially has an expiration date of whenever Ubisoft pulls the plug on the servers. Aside from that, when I first started playing, my controller was completely unusable. It would work for a second, not work for another second, and the button inputs would randomly change while playing the game. Once I sorted that out (for some reason it requires Steam Input) after an hour or so of playing I started getting ads between gameplay sections telling me to buy the DLC, even though I had bought the "X-Games Gold Edition" that supposedly came with all the DLC. I refunded it after that.

I've owned this game ever since being a kid and while I was never very good at it back then, I did play it often. I hadn't touched it in a long while since then, but the last couple weeks I've been recovering from some weird digestion issues and on a whim picked this game up to pass the time. It's really, really fun. The amount of love and care that went into this game really shines at every moment and there is so much to do in it that you could spend weeks or longer playing it just to complete everything or even to improve your scores. I didn't technically "finish" it because later in the game you start facing harder and harder objectives and it eventually reached a point where I was happy with what I got out of the game and didn't feel like stressing myself out with completing everything, especially since I was playing while getting over an illness. I'll surely revisit it again.

The only other Ratchet & Clank game I've played was the 2016 remake, but I can say without a doubt this one blows it out of the water. This is one game that truly feels "next-gen" with its extensive use of SSD loading times to pull off the effect of different dimensions ripping open the fabric of space. The story around it is done wonderfully, with Rivet & Kit feeling right at home in the midst of everything. I cannot even imagine what they're planning for the next one now that we know it's coming.

It's pretty good! I cannot believe I dismissed this game for as long as I did. It was pretty much the first game that did the whole RTX/ray tracing thing and had all these physics objects and stuff, and I thought it looked neat, but seemed more like a tech demo. It's actually way cooler than that and has all these freaky/weird moments that kept me hooked in the whole way through. It also has beautiful art direction that reminds me of Mirror's Edge in a lot of instances, which for me is a very good thing. So glad I played it.