Splatoon Raiders Ranks 7th Greatest Game Ever on Metacritic.
Splatoon Raiders is currently sitting in some genuinely wild company on Metacritic. According to the site’s User Score — the audience-driven rating system separate from official critic reviews — Nintendo’s new single-player Splatoon spin-off is now the seventh highest-rated video game of all time. Not just for 2026. All time.
That’s a big claim, so let’s break down what it actually means, because the number is more interesting than it might first appear.
The scores, side by side
Splatoon Raiders’ critic reception has already been strong on its own merits. At the time of writing, it holds a Metacritic critic score of 81, which currently places it 64th on the site’s list of the best-reviewed games of 2026 — sitting just ahead of Halo: Campaign Evolved and just behind Marathon.
But its Metacritic User Score is a different beast entirely. That figure currently sits at 9.3, and that’s the number putting it seventh on Metacritic’s all-time list — not just among 2026 releases, among every game ever scored on the platform.
Here’s the company it’s keeping
The current top 10 games of all time on Metacritic by User Score reads like a genuinely strange mix: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Silent Hill 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Blood and Wine expansion, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Cory in the House, Resident Evil Requiem, Splatoon Raiders, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, and Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne.
Notice anything odd in there? Right between Metal Gear Solid 3 and Resident Evil Requiem sits Cory in the House — a Disney-licensed Nintendo DS game from the mid-2000s that, by pretty much any objective measure, has no business ranking anywhere near Ocarina of Time. It’s there almost entirely because it became an internet meme, with users flooding it with joke 10-out-of-10 scores over the years.
Why this stat should come with an asterisk
That Cory in the House detail matters a lot for understanding what’s actually happening with Splatoon Raiders’ ranking. Metacritic’s User Score list is generally treated as a measure of popularity, or sometimes outright notoriety, rather than a reliable quality indicator. Scores also tend to skew heavily toward the extremes — plenty of users rate games a flat 10 or a flat 0 specifically to swing the average as hard as possible in one direction.
That pattern shows up in Splatoon Raiders’ own numbers, too. The game has racked up hundreds of 10-out-of-10 user scores, but it’s also picked up a scattering of 0 scores from users apparently trying to drag the average back down — which is exactly the kind of tug-of-war that produces a wildly inflated (or deflated) number rather than a truly representative one.
Metacritic has tried to fight this before
This isn’t a new problem for the site. Back in 2020, Metacritic introduced a 36-hour delay before users can submit a score for a newly released game — a change made specifically to curb review bombing, where high-profile releases get flooded with unfair negative scores immediately after launch. When someone tries to rate a game within that first 36-hour window now, they’re shown a message asking them to spend some time playing it first. That the same mechanism can be exploited in the opposite direction, with users piling on unusually high scores instead, shows just how imperfect crowd-sourced scoring really is.
So does Splatoon Raiders actually deserve the hype?
Setting the inflated ranking aside, there’s a real signal buried in here: Splatoon Raiders clearly has an unusually passionate fanbase willing to actively campaign for it online, and that’s not nothing for Nintendo. It lines up with what critics have already said about the game in more measured terms — VGC’s own review called it a challenging, all-out action game that successfully translates the main series’ multiplayer identity into a satisfying solo experience, built around a simple but genuinely engaging shoot-die-upgrade-repeat loop.
That kind of dedicated community response tracks with a broader trend of Nintendo’s biggest 2026 releases sparking outsized fan engagement — you can see a version of the same enthusiasm in how thoroughly Splatoon Raiders’ actual review reception has held up across outlets, independent of the Metacritic User Score noise. And if you’re curious how another wildly hyped 2026 release is holding up under scrutiny, it’s worth comparing this to the more mixed community reaction toward Halo: Campaign Evolved’s historic PlayStation debut, which sits just below Splatoon Raiders on Metacritic’s 2026 critic rankings.
Splatoon Raiders being the seventh greatest game of all time on Metacritic User Score is a fun headline, but it says a lot more about how passionate — and occasionally chaotic — its early audience is than it does about objective quality. Between the Cory in the House precedent and the visible tug-of-war between 10s and 0s in its own score, this is a stat to enjoy with a healthy dose of skepticism. The 81 critic score is still the more reliable indicator of how good the game actually is — and that number is plenty strong on its own.