Splatoon might look all cutesy and approachable, with its turf wars and stylish squid kids. (And no, that's ink, not blood.) And sure, it's a lot less brutal than Call of Duty. If you jump in thinking the single-player campaign was enough of a tutorial, though, you're in for a rude surprise. For as casual as Splatoon is, it's a sweaty, unforgiving series that happily stomps newcomers into the ground before they have a chance to learn. Enter Splatoon Raiders, a game that, despite ostensibly being single-player (unless you want to play co-op), teaches you a lot of the skills you need to succeed in Splatoon's standard Turf War mode.

Splatoon's weapons are one of its biggest learning curves. The gap between feeling confident using a weapon in the training grounds, where everything moves slowly and nothing hurts you, and an actual Turf War match, where everything hurts you before you realize what even happened, is massive. There's just no chance to learn how weapons are supposed to function in a realistic scenario and, perhaps to keep the illusion of Splatoon as a........

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