SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake

[regemond]

I wanted to play this from when it first came out, but refused to pay full price for a SpongeBob game in... 2023. Huh, I thought this was more than a year old. Anyway. It's a typical mascot platformer that seemed to breed and multiply in the PS2/Xbox/GameCube days, but brought to life with a glorious new-gen shine. I sound highly cynical, and to be honest, I am on this one.

 

It's linear to a tee (definite positive), but you get a few little side quests that require a touch of exploration - collect a number of golden coins, find a specific character, discover golden spatulas. However, a lot of these extra bits and bobs are locked behind power-based gates. Things like a karate kick, or swinging on a fish hook, or a mega smash. What this means is that if I want to collect everything, it's not a one and done situation, but I essentially need to play the game twice.

 

It's false padding.

 

Anyway, how does it play, I (don't) hear you ask? Meh. It's serviceable. Jumps can be very awkward. Combat can be awkward. Skills can be unresponsive.

 

However, despite all this meh-ness, there's still enough to keep me playing. I think this might be one of the first games I finish this year. Won't be getting 100%, though. Fuck that noise.

[regemond]

Finished this the other day. As a short, palette cleanser game, this isn't bad. I got about half the trophies, but really can't be bothered with the rest, as they're either collect 'em all goals, or really strict boss battle goals.

 

The story was awful (to be expected given the source material), but you can tell that either the show staff was involved, or that the dev team love SpongeBob in general. It has a lot of the cutaways the show is famous for (ie the Ren and Stimpy-style static image cutaways) for particularly icky imagery. The script is fun, and it references tons and tons of different things from the series history. SpongeBob has loads of costumes you can buy, too, and all of them reference different episodes.

 

I had fun, but not enough fun to put myself through playing all the levels again to get 100% on every one.