I love Splatoon Raiders for the same reason I love Donkey Kong Bananza – it’s dead simple, you can barely see what’s going on, and yet somehow it works

One of the micro-trends I’ve been happiest to spot in the last few years is Nintendo’s embracing of what you could term apocalyptic simplicity. And by micro-trends, I mean this: I’ve spotted it in just two games.

The first of these was Donkey Kong Bananza, a wonderfully propulsive beat-’em-up in which the ’em you were often beating up was the environment itself. Bananza was all about being powerful and fast and using your fists to smash through the earth, turning each carefully crafted level into so much gravel and sand. It was all about digging through stuff until there was no stuff left. And it turned out to be Nintendo’s most joyous game in quite a while.

And now Splatoon Raiders is here. It’s a third-person shooter, but it piles on so many enemies, often of such great size, that you’re frequently blasting away at anything and everything around you. You drop into a level, you kill pretty much everything that spawns, and then you collect any trinkets that are left behind afterwards. Reader, it is bloodthirsty stuff. And like Bananza, it’s a game that would rather fling more at you than you can parse than slow down for a second. To put it another way, both games pursue absolute carnage so thoroughly that the camera sometimes can’t really keep up. Rather beautifully, the game itself doesn’t seem to mind.

In Bananza, the camera often had to follow you down underground into gorilla-sized tunnels that were being cut through all kinds of delicious rocks. Odd viewpoints ensued. In Raiders, the camera often has to follow you into the midst of battles in which vast enemies are clipping through the picture plane and then exploding with gunk. The endless churn of the thing!

Both games are so confident in their hectic action that not always being able to see what’s going on doesn’t really matter much. In Raiders, specifically, you can be guided by your ears. Enemies are often chunky and taut of skin in this world, so each connecting shot lets out a kind of snare drum rat-a-tat, far faster than any sensible snare drummer would ever choose to play. It does its job beautifully: you’re on target. So you can trust the game, is what I’m saying. You can trust Nintendo.

Bananza has been a constant presence in my thinking as I’ve played Splatoon Raiders, but in truth there’s probably a more straightforward lineage. If you’ve played any of the last few Splatoon games, you’ll know that these PvP shooters feature a kind of PvE offshoot called Salmon Run. These are moments where you take your gang of ink-flinging squid and face off against monstrous fish creatures. These missions are all about surviving waves of hideous enemies and escaping with as much loot as you can carry. Splatoon Raiders takes this idea – along with armfuls of Splatoon weapons and tentacles-full of Salmon Run enemy types – and spins it off into its own thing.

So you’re exploring a strange series of islands hunting for treasure. Your base is a makeshift raft where you can pick over your winnings and level up various weapons and powers. And from there you head off to explore little archipelagos, or to drill down through cave networks, in search of loot and with a mission to splatter pretty much anything that moves. And there’s a lot of stuff moving.

That’s the basics, and it turns out to be the basics for a thrillingly single-minded action game. Whatever you do, you’re leaving the base to kill stuff and gather loot. And the loot you gather is brought back to base where you use it to get better at killing stuff. (I’ll put this in here: you can do all this alone or with three friends, both online or in local wireless.)

It helps that, with Splatoon, Raiders has a central collection of systems that are amongst the best in modern action games. Ink is your ammo for whatever weapon you’re taking out into the field, but it also coats the surfaces it comes into contact with, and when you’re on a surface covered with your specific colour of ink you can switch to squid form, which allows you to duck down into the ink, avoiding your enemies while simultaneously refilling your ammo.

You can also use your ink to zip around really quickly, even climbing walls or sliding through grates if you’ve splashed enough ink around. Enemy ink, meanwhile, slows you down and can cause real trouble. There are no overt territory capture mechanics in Raiders as there is in Splatoon, but there might as well be. It’s often still in your best interests to paint everything you see.

When it comes to combat, you can fling ink using everything from machine guns to huge paint rollers to a single paint brush. This paint brush has always seemed like the rapier of the Splatoon series to me. It’s the weapon of nobility, elegant and dashing. But it’s also incredibly hard to use really well. A lot of the weapons come with learning curves. And such is the hectic nature of Raiders that I worked my way through the campaign using twin pistols and machine gun variants more than anything else. I still had a lot of fun.

Understanding your weapons is closely linked to understanding your enemies, many of which return from Salmon Run. There are standard wobbling horrors and little guys with flying pans, but as you see more of the game you get the mechanical eels, which come on like freight trains, spewing toxins, and steered by a single operator at the back, tower guys (a nasty amphibious laser beam mounted on top of what appears to be a teetering pile of saucepans) and all sorts of other, bigger terrors.

They’re wonderfully grim, incidentally, and so is the wider world of Splatoon Raiders. The archipelagos you travel across are caught somewhere between post-industrial wasteland and the inside of an ash tray. Salmon Run itself was gloriously grimy, so it’s nice to see the weird aesthetic continued here.

These enemies spawn in groups, and Raiders is at its most thrilling when you’re racing into the fray, surrounded by baddies of all different kinds, some of which need to be whittled down, some of which need to be shot from specific angles, some of which fly, or erupt from the ground, and some of which do as much damage as they expire as they did when they were around.

Most of the time, you’re in the thick of this, dodging ink and all kinds of other projectiles. The game’s relentless pace, I think, comes in part down to the way these guys spawn in waves, and the fact that incoming damage generally doesn’t seem to interrupt whatever you’re doing, which is generally shooting back or reloading. What this means is that, every time I die, it always seems like a total shock – I had no idea I was even sick! But it also gives the game a constant sense of forward momentum that reminds me – odd to type this? – of the recent Doom games.

Alongside traditional weapons you also go into battle with an ink tank on your back, after picking from a range that all have their own qualities and special abilities, as well as relics, that grant useful perks, and gadgets that allow you to pull off special moves. I like the gadget that allows me to jump up and then do massive area damage, for example, and I like to pair it to the gadget that creates a circle of ink around me. Gadget choices are linked to your choice of tank, and they can be flared in unusual directions by attaching parts that grant special upgrades. All of this stuff can be found in the field as loot or upgraded back at the base. There’s a load to tinker with, and it allows you to play in interesting ways, but it’s designed to be fun to experiment with rather than a system of tortuous intricacy.

There’s also a companion mech you take with you, who’s CPU controlled and looks after themselves. You can use this mech to grant you a double-jump, and you can also trigger a special attack by charging it up through the collection of orange eggs your enemies drop. These things are game changers, and can of course be levelled up and tricked out back at the base. You can also change the nature of the special attack by changing the member of your team you take out with you in the mech. If you’re starting out, may I recommend Frye, who summons a storm of morays from the sky.

Mission types mainly fall into either exploring an archipelago and clearing out specific nodes so your mech can drill for treasure, or drilling through a series of underground chambers and killing everything there. Often these chambers will have a time limit, during which you have to collect a certain amount of orange eggs to charge up the mech enough to drill down to the next later. Written down this seems complicated, and there are additional types of level that encourage you to use specific parts of your arsenal in ways that feel almost puzzle-like. But generally, if you’re playing Raiders, you’re blasting something and trying to stay alive. It’s wonderfully direct stuff.

And as with Bananza, what I’m left with at the end of it all is a sense of astonishment. This game is so carefree in its mayhem, so uncluttered in its thinking, that it absolutely reeks of youthful confidence. Let’s spin this PvE mode off into its own game! And let’s not worry too much about whether you can follow every second of the action when things get wild. Better to let them get wild in the first place!

This is the trick with Nintendo, I think: a sense of eternal youth when it comes to its design. And for now, that youthful energy is pursuing apocalyptic simplicity. Not bad.

A copy of Splatoon Raiders was provided for this review by Nintendo.