In a direct comparison to other roguelites, Side Order comes out looking pretty weak, lacking the variety in levels and modifiers that keeps better entries in the genre feeling fresh right up to the hundred-hour mark. What saves Side Order is that, at the end of the day, it's still Splatoon. And Splatoon is very, very fun to play.
My favorite thing about any of the single-player campaigns in the Splatoon franchise is that they give me the chance to fool around with weapons I would never have given the time of day otherwise. On this axis, Side Order succeeds more than anything before it, as the right combination of color chips can outright invalidate whatever weaknesses a weapon is supposed to have. I wouldn't be caught dead using a charger in multiplayer (well, technically, I would be caught dead - several times), but here I can turn it into a tap-firing homing laser, and there's power in that. In general, I actually quite like the color-chip system: on their face, most of the upgrades aren't very creative (damage, fire rate, ink efficiency, etc.), but the numbers stack to such ridiculous degrees that they end up feeling transformative anyway. Maybe too transformative, at times - the Lucky upgrades pop so often in the late game that you only need one or two before you're drowning in more powerups than you'll ever need.
I hate to say I'm a tad disappointed with the story, though. Splatoon isn't exactly a franchise that needs to be taken seriously, but previous campaigns were worth paying attention to just to see what kind of out-of-pocket madness they'd decided to throw into the mix. Here, we don't really get that - everything's set up by the end of the tutorial, and though you do continue to get new dialogue as you clear the real game multiple times, nothing ever really surprises. That said, as someone who lost in Splatoon 2's final Splatfest, it's nice to see an excuse to have the Order aesthetic brought to life anyway (and, in retrospect, it definitely fits a DLC more than it would have the main hub).
My favorite thing about any of the single-player campaigns in the Splatoon franchise is that they give me the chance to fool around with weapons I would never have given the time of day otherwise. On this axis, Side Order succeeds more than anything before it, as the right combination of color chips can outright invalidate whatever weaknesses a weapon is supposed to have. I wouldn't be caught dead using a charger in multiplayer (well, technically, I would be caught dead - several times), but here I can turn it into a tap-firing homing laser, and there's power in that. In general, I actually quite like the color-chip system: on their face, most of the upgrades aren't very creative (damage, fire rate, ink efficiency, etc.), but the numbers stack to such ridiculous degrees that they end up feeling transformative anyway. Maybe too transformative, at times - the Lucky upgrades pop so often in the late game that you only need one or two before you're drowning in more powerups than you'll ever need.
I hate to say I'm a tad disappointed with the story, though. Splatoon isn't exactly a franchise that needs to be taken seriously, but previous campaigns were worth paying attention to just to see what kind of out-of-pocket madness they'd decided to throw into the mix. Here, we don't really get that - everything's set up by the end of the tutorial, and though you do continue to get new dialogue as you clear the real game multiple times, nothing ever really surprises. That said, as someone who lost in Splatoon 2's final Splatfest, it's nice to see an excuse to have the Order aesthetic brought to life anyway (and, in retrospect, it definitely fits a DLC more than it would have the main hub).