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So, I'm one of the six people that had a Wii U when it was relevant. I actually knew that it wasn't just a tablet add-on to the Wii! Nintendo had a lot of interesting ideas going on with the Wii U, including things like asymmetric multiplayer, using the tablet as a second gameplay screen (for things like a map). But the tablet also allowed for gyro controls. First and third person shooters on consoles have always had this issue where the precision just always wasn't there compared to on PC, where you are using a mouse. They probably weren't the first, but Nintendo realized they could bridge the gap at least a little using those gyro controls. They also Nintendo'd it up and made the goal less about killing people and more about territory control.
Let's address the elephant in the room -- the online servers for the Wii U have been shut down. And that's a problem for Splatoon, because it was primarily a multiplayer game. I did get to play Splatoon while it was still online, and it was a great time. I'm also aware that the Wii U hacking scene is quite vibrant so there's probably something out there to get it back online, but it doesn’t compare to the game's height in popularity. So, the game’s 'main' gameplay mode was online, attempting to color most of the map with your team's color. You could kill other players to keep them from doing it, but no matter how many people you killed it didn't matter, because at the end you'd be judged by how much of the map was covered by your color. Obviously, whoever had the most percentage of their color wins. I thought this was a novel concept for a multiplayer game! It must have been, since there's two sequels where you can continue to play this mode on the Switch.
So enamored by the multiplayer that I was never much bothered with what single player did exist in the game until recently. Like so many of these games, the single player mostly serves as 'training' for the multiplayer. The multiplayer contains all the same controls and abilities -- you cover ground in your colored ink, you can swim in the ink to move faster, you can throw bombs, you unlock new weapons, and so on. It also uses those gyro controls for aiming and shooting at the enemies, who are Octopuses. It even often contains mini arenas that are very much just the multiplayer against CPU opponents in a smaller controlled environment. The other times it feels more like a linear 3D platformer, testing you on your ability to use the ink swimming and shooting to cross platforms and solve puzzles. There are also bosses which are usually part action and part puzzle, much as the levels are. I think these are all pretty solid. They usually do a good job of teaching you something before expecting you to put it to practice and ramping up what it expects you to know and how fast it expects you to react. The final levels being culmination of everything, especially the final boss.
Overall, I think it's still worth playing through the singleplayer if you have a Wii U around to dust off. It's a shame the multiplayer is gone, thankfully there's two sequels still out there to play... for now.
