Squid Kids, now available.

[A Black Falcon]

I'm now up to level 26, and just reached rank B in ranked mode. So yes, this game is great and very addictive. The graphics are good, the maps and modes varied, and the core paint-the-world mechanic is fantastic and changes first or third-person shooter game play in a significant and great way. My love for maps and such fits perfectly in with this games' "paint everything" mechanic. That's probably why I like the rollers best as weapons too, they do the best at painting the ground...

For a few criticisms though, I don't like the way the ranking system works, as you need to win consistently to move up in rank but that can be completely up to random chance because how you do depends in large part on the random selection of the two teams. I want to play ranked to play the modes beyond just Turf War, because while that is the best mode here the others are mostly good too, but the points and ranking system is not great. After the lowest ranks you lose as many (or more) points for a loss than you gain for a win, so gaining ranks requires luck as much as it does skill... blah.

Additionally, while the modes in ranked are fun and add some good variety to the game, it is kind of too bad that you can only play one mode (Rainmaker, Tower Control, etc.) per day. The way the game works is to intentionally try to get you to play a little bit each day but stick with the game long term, and that is successful at that goal, but it also can be annoying. I mean, some of the ranked modes are more fun than others. My least favorite is probably the one where you have to paint a certain zone, particularly in maps that have only one control zone right in the center of the map, because that encourages camping to a sometimes frustrating degree. Sure, you can just play the main standby Turf War mode and go back to ranked the next day, but most any other shooter would just let people play any mode at any time, and that is probably the better design. And I haven't even started on the maps, which work the same way -- only two maps are available in each of the two available modes, Turf War and whichever Ranked mode it is, each day. "Play again tomorrow to see what modes and maps are available!" may work as a keep-people-playing mechanism, but it is also annoying game design which artificially limits your options in order to keep you stuck to this game, so it's probably more bad than it is good.