Frickin well. Splatoon is a near perfect game that effectively introduces a new franchise into the Nintendo family while keeping all of the old Nintendo charm that its fans are used to.
To begin with Splatoon's single player mode: The collection of over twenty levels offers little challenge and a good portion of the levels represent the same style of level played over and over again. The only redeeming quality is the epic boss battle that you get to play through at the end. It requires much more skill than any of the prior levels and it's also a lot of fun to play.
The Battle Dojo is lame. Plain and simple. It's not fun and it would have been better if it had been left out. It's the only filler that the game offers for local multiplayer, so if you really want to play against your friends locally, this is the only way to do it.
And now multiplayer: it seriously rocks. Both Turf War (the game's main for of multiplayer in which two teams of four fight to see who can cover more land with their color) and Splat Zones (another form of multiplayer in which two teams of four fight over either one or two zones on the map for a select amount of time) are a lot of fun and offer good times game after game. Turf War is always fun whereas Splat Zones has one huge issue. The ranking system.
The ranking system in Splat Zones is the one downfall of the online multiplayer. The ranking system is not individually based, but rather falls completely onto your team as a whole. The teamwork is a nice thought but only proves frustrating. I've had games where I've gone 20:2 for a kill-death ratio, or rather a splat-splatted ratio, and ended up losing points in my ranking because my team under performed and we lost. This is a hugely annoying part of Splatoon that has turned me away from playing more hours of the game.
My other main gripe is that the map selection is severely limited. At a given time, only two maps are in the rotation for being selected, which means that, and this has happened to me, you can get the same map fifteen times in a row. Really annoying.
Overall, the game has the magic of any Nintendo game but a few big annoyances hold it back from being perfect.
Splatoon
9.0 - great
Splatoon is an imaginative and pleasant game to play, whether it be single player or multiplayer, but a few big problems hold it back.
