Welcome to my personal opinion on the Octo Expansion for Splatoon 2 and how I feel this is long overdue.
Today, Nintendo finally released the highly anticipated Octo Expansion DLC for the popular Splatoon 2 game, after several months of waiting, it is finally here. It basically brings a completely new story of an Octoling called Agent 8 in the Deepsea Metro.
The new adventure features 80 missions starring Agent 8, a new character who awakens without her memories on a dark subway platform. Navigate the twisted depths in a battle to reach the surface of Inkopolis. Once you escape, you’ll be able to join multiplayer* matches as an Octoling!
The Octo expansion is basically the single-player mode that you always knew you wanted. Sure, the original has a single player mode, but I consider that more as a very extended tutorial of everything the game brings to the table, but the Octo Expansion is so much more. It brings a story and a challenging single-player mode.
For the purpose of this article, I will keep it short and not provide too many spoilers into the lore of the game. Among the first few levels, it becomes clear that you enter by means of a station of the metro. You pay the entry fee and then go down the hole for a challenge. The very first one being the challenge of staying alive. You get 3 areas that you need to survive in order to proceed. Basically, this does challenge you enough as it imposes a specific weapon onto you.
One of the following challenges is to bring an eight ball to a specific point in the level. Let me tell you this when you have been mostly playing online games the past months, this provided much more of a challenge than I would like to admit. I got lazy in my ways of playing and this level instantly woke me up and forced a certain finesse onto my gameplay. A few failed attempts and entry fees later, I succeeded and was very happy I got my groove on.
Next up for my article, a level where you need to carry the rainmaker into enemy terrain and avoid getting whacked by the enemies. As you are limited in your weapon choices for the Octo expansion, this is usually not the easiest of challenges and I was happy to finish it without losing more than 1 life. Like in a real battle, the enemies will use all sorts of weapons while you are limited to just the one you pick at the beginning if given that choice.
As you progress, you free up more and more subway lines on the map and that will allow you to play more and more levels too, to eventually reach the promised land. It should come to no surprise that this is a full-fledged 80 levels worth of single-player action and we should have gotten this much earlier really. Splatoon is such an amazing IP, it deserved to be a much more complete game from the start.
I always felt the game got its fame from being a top-notch online game, but it could be so much more, which is proven by the Octo Expansion. I would love to see even more of this already!
So is this DLC worth 20 bucks?
Hell yeah, it is, this Octo expansion is amazing and it should be bought if you like the game. It will bring a lot of action and most importantly FUN to the game as you have not really experienced before. it is so much more than the original levels included in the game and I think Nintendo hit the nail right in the middle, this is a straight on top-notch example of how DLC should be.
Will 80 levels be enough to warrant the price tag?
I think so, at 20 bucks for it all, this matches up to 4 levels per euro. 4 well balanced and fun levels. I can not stress this enough, the game needed a true single player experience and Nintendo delivered.
I did not intend to rate the expansion because I can only award it a perfect score based upon how it plays and what it costs. The reason not really wanting to rate it is simple, I think this should have been there from the start. Splatoon 2 always felt like a quick remake of the initial Wii U game and it needed more to set itself apart from the original. This Expansion does that trick, but should have been there from the start in my humble opinion.
Nevertheless, I would instantly buy it again…
