The Digital Foundry tech review.
The presentation instantly feels more elaborate, the single-player mode is vast and the visuals have improved.
It feels like the game Nintendo has been working towards since the very beginning.
The camera then cuts to your character with a more fully fleshed-out, animation rich character customisation sequence.
It then seamlessly pans over to the starting point before kicking into the training mission.
It’s entirely missing in the original release and makes a profound difference here.
When you eventually complete the training, you’re dropped out into the game’s hub.
It’s a relatively small area running at 30 frames per second with an increase in resolution and detail.
It’s here where you access all the different modes and shops.
Splatoon 3 shakes this up sending the player to Splatsville - the city of chaos.
In this scenario, ideas and talent go a long way.
It seems to bottom out around 820p in docked mode.
Portable mode tops out at 720p while DRS can see drops roughly to 540p or so.
The thing to keep in mind is that FSR 1.0 is not anti-aliasing - it’s a spatial upscaler.
However, the single-player mode sees the greatest improvements.
Splatoon 2 took things further but the new game is much more satisfying.
Without veering too much into spoiler territory, it builds on the prior games but offers more of everything.
Another nice detail I noted while playing - there’s actual persistence during a session.
Between each stage, you’ll explore the islands and that includes spraying paint all over the place.
In Splatoon 3, that’s no longer the case - it’s kept in memory.
And the new and improved hub area?
Yes, unfortunately, it does still run at 30fps.