SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake pulled a Sonic Superstars for me... just nowhere near as severe.

First off, let me get the positives out of the way. Firstly, and the most obvious/apparent is that the graphic's and overall presentation are a HUGE step up from BFBB Rehydrated. The game has decent lighting, textures and the character models actually have good animations and don't look completely wooden. Another positive is the voice acting. To my knowledge, all the cast members of the show reprise their roles here and they all do a stellar job as usual and did the best with what they could do with the corny ass script they were given. The combat is incredibly simplistic but can be fun if you're fighting hoards of base level goons at a time. Sometimes I just like to shut my brain off and kick some ass don't judge me lmao.

Now for the negatives. Now obviously I don't expect the world from a licensed game let alone a SpongeBob one. But not only is the level design so simple that even calling it "simple" in the first place is a massive understatement, but like Sonic Superstars, levels go on for way too fucking long. If you've played other licensed games like Simpsons Hit and Run, you'd know how missions consist of nothing but a long lined string of fetch quests that ultimately means nothing in the game's story. Same deal here. But the absolute biggest sin of this game and what made it such a huge disappointment... is that this game is just one giant asset flip of BFBB. I started to have my suspicions about it when I was playing through Wild West Jellyfish Fields but it didn't become blatantly obvious until Karate Downtown Bikini Bottom (which is the worst fucking stage in the whole game).

I have some other criticisms here and there but I think I made my point. All in all; this game is inoffensive enough and if you have little kids who like SpongeBob or if you yourself are a fan I can say this game is harmless enough to try out. But if you're not a fan of the source material, you're just left with an incredibly basic, tedious 3D platformer. 5/10. It's okay.

There's so much to say with this game. The pros are the developers did alot of correct Spongebob references to certain episodes from newer and older seasons, the cutscene animations are very expressive, and the music is pretty catchy.

The gameplay itself is very simple platforming and good for people who don't play platformers or good for children and families to play. You learn a new ability by going through each level and it makes platforming very interesting. The downside to this is the game never fully uses these abilities to its full potential. The enemies have cool designs, but the majority of them you can just do basic attacks to defeat them. The main collectables in the game are jelly and doubloons. There are set amount of doubloons in each level, but jelly will respawn an unlimited amount if you die or restart the level. Doubloons just unlock more costumes in the costume shop and you buy them with jellies. There's also other mini side quests where you collect various things for certain characters. Nice if you want to 100% the game. The downside to all of this is if you aren't going to 100% the game, then you have no incentive to collect anything and can run past the majority of the enemies. The boss fights aren't even really fights. You mostly wreck parts of the level to "fight" them. It takes you out of the game and makes it feel like an extention of the level, not like a boss fight at all.

I was playing this on PS4, so I don't know if anyone else has these issues. First of all the audio for cutscenes never match the cutscene. It's either off by 8 seconds or characters will repeat the same sentence over and over or the audio just cuts out entirely. This is also the same within levels. The music within levels will just cut out for the entire level most of the time. Plus, the death animations almost never play out. I've fallen through the bottom of the map multiple times, enemies sometimes never attack, and collectables sometimes never can be collected. Also, the game would freeze for me multiple times during cutscenes and gameplay.

Boss Fight Gripe: (this is where the spoiler is, incase you care about spoilers for a Spongebob game lol): The last boss fight is kindof unfair. You fight Squidward but hes transformed into a giant squid and his tenticles will hurt you or make projectiles that hurt you. These are easy to dodge. But then the main villian of the game is shooting harmful jelly at you, you have to dodge enemies and suction them up with the reef blower so you can attack the villian. Sounds ok enough, but you get stunned by the enemies for about 4 seconds and the knockback from getting hit by everything else will literally trap you in an endless loop of pain and you will die instantly. I got lucky on my 4th try, but still almost died and it felt like the game was completely unfair.

I know this is a licensed game, but there are great licensed games out there. This is an average game and the story is nice. I'm a very long time Spongebob fan and have watched this show since day 1 and even that can't save this game from ultimately being mediocre.

A welcome surprise after years of less than subpar Spongebob games. As a Battle for Bikini Bottom fan, I appreciate what this game was going for, especially with all the callbacks to what is still, in my opinion, the best game in the franchise by a huge margin.

But it does feel really... cheap? Unfinished even? More time in the oven would've really helped to polish what's here. Animations are pretty janky, combat isn't anywhere near as satisfying as BFBB, it's ridiculously short, and everything just looks kind of plain. I'm sure the devs weren't afforded all the time and money they would've liked, so I respect the shoes they were trying to fill here regardless.

Cosmic Shake is a really good Spongebob game that doesn't quite reach the shoulders of the two giants that are BFBB and the Movie game, but it's a step in the right direction I hope to see turn into more of a leap by the time we get another entry.

2023 Ranked

There were quite a few audio bugs during major cutscenes, and some pop-in. The level design is also pretty forgettable compared to BFBB and the Movie game.

It's still fun if you like the previous games, but it definitely feels like people trying to make a platformer from scratch for the first time at certain points. If I'm not mistaken, the developer hadn't really made their own game until this one. They just seem to be fans of BFBB that got to do Rehydrated.

If there's one thing I do love about this game though, it's the music. They really went all out in that respect.

It was fun!
The world design was lovely for the most part. The medieval world didn't feel at the level of the rest, kinda quickly made and not unique.
The platforming is AWESOME! probably my favorite part of the game. SpongeBob's move set and the level design were quite enjoyable.
My least favorite part has got to be the Latin American Spanish dub. The actual voices were good, but the localization was TERRIBLE. It felt very disjointed and directionless, as if they didn't give the actors context on what was supposed to be happening on the scenes. It felt as if they just gave them a list of lines to read and to read them as they pleased.

Love the many references. It's the definition of Fan support and I Love that shit.
Liked that there are still games being made in this style. Miss them.

But I think that the collectibles are the biggest letdown of this game. I was hoping for a big range of colletibles, cause these worlds are just so beautiful and games like this are perfect for collecting.
It's the best part about it. It's just very dissappointing to see, that this part is the most bare bones.

The rest is really fun. Game is just pure joy and easy fun.