Call of Duty, Halo, Doom, Fortnite, and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds are all examples of popular shooters: Fortnite, with its third-person view and its more cartoonish style, and Doom, with as much gore as it can fit into one screen. All these games have one goal – to kill the enemy before they kill you. I have never been a fan of these kinds of killing based games. They are too close to the reality I see in the world. 

How do I play a shooter game without all the killing? The answer is Splatoon 2, a game for the Nintendo Switch. Both Splatoon games are a combination of paintball and a stealth game. The idea is that, as an inkling, you splatter your ink everywhere across the map. You can dive into that ink as a squid, making you invisible to other players. When you drown in your opponents’ ink, which is a different color than your own, you are ‘splatted’. It’s Nintendo’s way of saying ‘killed’. 

The game further immerses players into the ink setting by adding weapons such as the roller (which is just a paint roller twice the size of your character), a brush (once again twice the size of your character), and a bucket. These things add to the diverse array of short and long-range weapons. 

While it may seem that this game is geared towards a younger and less competitive audience, this is not the case. I have seen veterans of the shooting genre try to play this game, asking for the controller saying, “It can’t be that hard,” only to get splatted moments later. The game is unique enough that the mechanics within it are brand new, making it a fresh take within the oversaturated shooter genre.