Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 brought a refreshingly colorful alternative to traditional shooters onto the Switch. Instead of eliminating opponents, the goal is to cover as much territory as possible in your own team's ink, which makes the game a more strategic and accessible experience than classic arenas – even a player who doesn't hit anyone can win the match for their team by diligently painting the floor. Players, in the form of humanoid squid-kids called Inklings, can transform into cephalopods and in this form move lightning-fast through their own color across walls and floors, creating a unique rhythm between attack and tactical maneuvering. Ink serves simultaneously as ammunition and as terrain, so shooting, movement, and territory capture are all one and the same activity in this game.

Besides four-versus-four Turf War matches, the game offers ranked Ranked Battles with variations like Rainmaker or Tower Control, as well as a full-fledged single-player campaign set in the underground Octo Valley, where the Inklings face an army of Octarians; the campaign also serves as an excellent tutorial for controls and the individual weapon types. The off-battlefield layer deserves special attention too: the capital city of Inkopolis Square has its own music industry with idol bands, whose songs accompany the seasonal Splatfests – massive community events where players split into two sides based on their preferred theme and compete for the honor of their team.

The second installment added new weapons, such as the Splat Roller and the Dualies pistols with a dodge roll, and expanded the offering with the cooperative Salmon Run mode, in which four players fend off waves of salmonid monsters and collect their eggs. The paid Octo Expansion then offered a series of very difficult trials and a surprisingly dark story that earned a reputation as the best content in the entire game. Splatoon 2 became one of the pillars of the early Switch library, exceptionally popular especially in Japan, and cemented the series' reputation as the most distinctive new brand Nintendo has created in the last decade.