Splatoon Raiders Has The Highest Metacritic User Score In Nintendo History

Splatoon Raiders Has A Higher User Score Than Any Other Game Nintendo Has Ever Made Nintendo Published Jul 27, 2026, 3:44 AM EDT Josh Coulson is an editor at TheGamer covering breaking news on everything from colorful platformers to the latest Lego sets. Primarily a news writer since 2018, Josh has covered just about every major game from the past decade. Now an editor, their focus has shifted to being the leading affiliate expert at the site, building relationships between TheGamer and global brands including Mattel, Funko, and The Pokemon Company. Sign in to your TheGamer account Splatoon Raiders arrived on Nintendo Switch 2 without a huge amount of fanfare last week. A Nintendo release heading into the summer before the bigger games start to arrive in September. However, Raiders has been a hit with those who have played it, as the Splatoon spinoff has quietly racked up the highest user score in Nintendo history. Splatoon Raiders settled on an 81 on Metacritic when it comes to critic reviews. A decent score, and one that aligns with the other three games in the series. However, now that the user base has been playing the game for a few days, its user score has been registered, and it’s far more impressive. Splatoon Raiders Is The Best Nintendo Game Ever, In A Way Nintendo The new Splatoon game has an incredible 9.3. That’s the seventh highest user score in Metacritic history, and the best a Nintendo-published game has ever achieved. It’s higher than Super Mario Odyssey, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and every other Nintendo game that has a score on Metacritic, a site whose back catalog dates all the way back to the N64. Odyssey and Breath of the Wild surprisingly aren’t Raiders’ closest competitors. The previous record holder of Nintendo’s most popular game among users on Metacritic was The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask with a score of 9.2. After that, its Pokemon HeartGold & SoulSilver with 9.1, and then the original Xenoblade Chronicles and both Ocarina of Time and its 3DS remaster, all of which also scored 9.1. A good sign for the Switch 2 remake of Ocarina of Time releasing later this year. The Splatoon Raiders Experiment Has Been A Success So Far The feat will be a particularly welcome one for Nintendo as Raiders was very much a Splatoon experiment. The three games in the core series are all rooted in multiplayer. Raiders is a test to see if there’s room in the Splatoon space for a story-focused single-player game. Clearly there is, and evidently, Splatoon fans seem to love it. Its record-breaking user score also comes on the heels of Nintendo boss Shigeru Miyamoto speaking on what the studio does that its rivals do not. Miyamoto commented on Nintendo’s aim of honing in on what its players want rather than chasing trends. There is no better example of that than Splatoon Raiders. As everyone else in the industry tries and fails to make the next live service juggernaut, Nintendo has gone in the opposite direction to create Raiders. The sales will need to match, but based on its user score, that strategy has, once again, paid off. Systems Released July 23, 2026 ESRB Everyone 10+ / Fantasy Violence Developer(s) Nintendo EPD Publisher(s) Nintendo Genre(s) Action, Adventure