Splatoon 3: Side Order - Review

When Splatoon 2 got its DLC, it delivered a challenging experience, but was sadly a one and done release, so it is no wonder that with the major DLC for Splatoon 3, Nintendo wanted to do something different. So that brings us to Side Order a rogue-like experience that has players attempting to climb to the top of a tower to stop Order. So, is this a great second serving or is this one side that should have been left alone?

Getting into the DLC requires you to take a train trip, but on the way you fall asleep and when you come to, you find yourself in a bland, colourless world and a small floating robot is calling your name. Pearl, one half of Off the Hook has found herself turned into a robot and the voice of her partner Marina, is coming from the tall tower nearby. As you venture into the tower you discover Acht standing in an elevator, a character that made their debut in the Splatoon 2 DLC, Octo-expansion. Here you get an explanation of some of what is going on and then you push forward to the top of the tower, where you find Marina captured by a machine and while freeing her is easy, it is only the beginning. I won’t explain anything else about the story, as it does take a few runs to get a good grip of things, but what captured Marina was Order, a problem she made that has ‘evolved’ in order to achieve its own goals. So your goal is to stop it and each time you fail, you just have to try again.

As a rogue-like, each time you enter the elevator to ascend the tower, things are going to be different and you are either going to enjoy that or you won’t, there really is no middle ground. The basic loop is that you need to ascend to the top floor, which is 30 floors up and each floor along your journey, will present a challenge of your choosing, except the boss floors. Before you begin a run, you will need to select a palette, this is what defines your weapon, sub-weapon and special for the run, along with the tones of the chips that you get. As you get to a new floor, a series of choices will appear, each choice has a difficulty level for it, along with a chip and Membux that you can earn, the harder the challenge, the greater the reward. Clear the stage by completing its assigned goal and you get to keep the chip and Membux, fail and you are booted out of the tower and have to start over again. From the outset you will only have a single palette to choose from, but as you earn keys by defeating bosses, you will have the chance to unlock more from the lockers that live near the front of the tower.

Once you hit a level, the room layout, challenge and even enemies will be randomly selected, based on the chip you selected. The challenges themselves are not numerous, there are only a few, escort a tower, defend a point, destroy some orbs, you get the idea. The layout of the stage is what changes and while you might start to notice some names of stages repeating, the layout of the stage is not going to be the same, though there are some familiar designs that will pop up. The game will also randomly through in extra modifiers that you can see on the selection screen, sometimes they are a bonus that helps you out, other times it’s a new danger that can punish you to an extreme. These danger options can be skipped, if you don’t feel like doing it, but the game will warn you that if you keep skipping them, you will eventually have no choice but to do one and they can be extremely challenging.

Now while you can keep venturing back in with the weapon you prefer, you will only get keys or bonus Prlz on the first attempt, so swapping out to new palettes is preferred. While Membux can unlock extra chips, or refill a lost life at vending machines in each run, Prlz are what you get when you fail, as your chips and remaining Membux are converted to them. These Prlz can be used to hack the tower, giving you slight edges in your future runs and they are permanently unlocked once you obtain it. Some options are going to give you slightly more damage, or more armour, perhaps Pearl will get more abilities in a run and of course, you can unlock extra lives to keep going when you fail. Depending on your choices, you can make the game more combat heavy or support heavy and the challenge will vary depending on that, so choosing wisely is ideal. Once you beat Order the first time, you will also unlock access to Cipher, a resident of the world who will also exchange Przl for items for your locker, banners and such, which is another thing to aim for, basically the more you play, the more you can decorate or tweak the tower to your advantage.

For all that is good, I often found myself finding some challenges just not worth doing. You would get one that has you attempting to put a ball in a hole, which sounds very simple, and it is. There was one challenge that looked quite hard, but as the ball doesn’t fall from the stage, you can give it a big nudge and have it roll away. The best time I had in one was 14 seconds, in fact after a few dozen runs, most of my times were getting down to under 30 seconds, though not for boss fights, some were quite challenging still. Because I was flying through some levels, I kept selecting the hardest challenge, just to see if it was hard and while some were, others honestly were not. Of course, player skill will factor into these challenges, but its honestly quite a letdown that most of the content in the game, doesn’t match up with I was expecting from a rogue-like.

Something that takes a bit of getting used to are the visuals, as the world is set within a computer, there is a Matrix vibe to things at times, but rather than the black and green of that, its more pastel. The backgrounds of each stage are mostly devoid of things, which helps keep your focus on the action, but sometimes the action doesn't have a lot of colour in the mix either. Something I did enjoy was that your ink colour, along with the hair and finger tip colours, change as you collect chips. If you have more purple than anything else, your hair becomes more purple and whatever the second most chip colour is, becomes the highlights. It is not something you will actively pay attention to, I honestly didn’t notice it for the longest time, but once I did, I spent a fun runs trying to select chips to make the change I wanted to do.

Splatoon 3’s Side Order is not going to be for everyone, for rogue-like fans, it may not offer as much depth as other games in the genre do and if you don’t like repetitive loops, nothing here is going to change that. What you will find is a solid addition to the game, each time you enter the tower with a different palette equipped, you honestly never know what exactly will happen. While some level elements do start to show up more often after you have done a number of runs, it still doesn’t stop you from having fun. While I never got the, just one more run vibe that I get from other titles in the genre, I did enjoy my time with it and you will as well.

The Score

8.0

Review code provided by Nintendo

The Pros

With the number of palettes and chips, each run does feel unique in the challenge it presents

The visuals might seem odd at first, but really works in selling that its not the real world

The Cons

The game does repeat a number of basic layouts quicker than you might expect

Unlocking new palettes can take a while if your unable to progress with some palettes