I remember having this game as a kid and playing it quite a bit. I used to play all the Nicktoons crossover games and they left a positive impact in my brain. I do remember liking this one well enough upon almost 15 year old nostalgia. This one is quite a bit different from the previous games in that the developer differs. The previous games were developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment, an Australian THQ subsidiary who mostly made licensed games until stumbling onto De Blob the same year as the release of this game. And so Incinerator Studios, a company who mostly handled ports of racing games up to this point and hadn’t developed an original game, was tasked to develop the yearly Nicktoons crossover game.
The first thing you notice going into this game is how bad the cutscene graphics are. They are almost notoriously bad and look uncanny compared to the previous games. It made me wonder if maybe this aspect came from not having all the previous assets (it's made in a different engine). Some sound effects are reused from the older games (I specifically noticed Spongebob’s jumping sound from Toybots) but all the voicework is fine and quite solid. There are some moments with an incredibly rocky framerate but it is mostly fine.
The strength of these games usually comes from the character interactions and this game has quite a bunch of these with some fun interactions in cutscenes (but not really during gameplay). The main gimmick of this game is combining the heroes and villains of different franchises for each level. Criticism has been made in the past of Fairly Odd Parents not being in this game but I honestly prefer having Zim here. It's interesting (I am not sure Dib is a villain, but I have not seen the show). Tak being in this game still is kind of insane but I guess the show was still airing at the time.
Toybots had a wide variety of characters in it (even some 90s nostalgia characters) but not a ton of variety to be seen here. Every character in this game feels the exact same to play with, it's all just basic 3 hit combo, a special move (a “gadget attack”) that weakens an enemy so it could be killed in one hit (every character has this but they use a different method) and a “gadget combo”, a super move that also uses the Wii’s motion control to activate that I never used once in the game (I imagine it uses the analog stick on the PS Editors Note: it involves doing a combination of button presses??? What is this nonsense?). I’m looking at the PS2 release’s manual at the moment and I noticed the game doesn’t even use the circle button on that console. This game reeks of something developed for the Wii and lazily ported to the PS2 (the game’s control scheme works oddly well on the Wii).
This gameplay itself is quite shit! It turns out this boring 3 hit combo is much more worth using than the gadget attack that has relatively shoddy hit detection. The 3 hit combo also feels horrible to use. It seems to love to auto target? Which is weird for a melee attack but it loves to automatically bring you to whatever is closest which at some points. In some moments you fight these big goo enemies near the end of a level and have to specifically hit it in the middle to hurt it. It’s not always on the ground however so you have to wait for it to drop down. It can’t drop on you because it hurts you and has heavy knockback when it does. So when you attempt to keep a distance and hit from closer to the outside, it autotargets to the legs of this goo creature! This creature also spawns more typical enemies. Hooray! More enemies for the melee attack to auto target instead of the main part you want to hit. So when you are trying to keep a distance it auto targets to the legs of the creature that doesn’t harm it. This felt completely infuriating at moments, especially the first time I encountered these enemies. This even applies to smaller groups of enemies; it's a bewildering choice for a beat 'em up.
There is ““platforming”” in this game but it is absolutely terrible as well. This game doesn’t feel designed to have any sort of platforming. There are many moments where the game's automatic camera will be in the worst positioning possible. So many leap of faiths are made in the game that are not fun. I really wish you could rotate the camera, maybe it could have been done with the DPad that is only used for activating the “gadget combo” (The 1 and 2 buttons on the remote are entirely unused!) Another problem for the platforming is that when you need to do any sort of precision, it's incredibly hard to know where your jump is going to be for a combination of two reasons. The first is because the camera is always at a horrible angle for platforming and the second is that your shadow is so tiny that it doesn't actually help you when the camera is in a weird angle.
Each level of the game opens up with you entering a portal that you have to slide through a little obstacle course to enter the actual level. It's an odd system but it has a lot of the coins for the stupid “upgrade system" I will discuss later. It just doesn’t feel right in this game. All of these slides feel identical to play in with nothing special here. The actual level designs are lackadaisical feeling so boring where despite having charm graphically as well as little references in the background they are a slog to go through. Levels are usually around 10 minutes or so long on average and mostly consist of just fighting enemies (who you can mostly skip over for the record) and the “platforming” mentioned above. However, when one of these levels just keeps going on it can drive you nuts. The second level of Danny Phantom’s world was almost half an hour long. I was in disbelief at how long it was taking to beat because it was just so boring. By the end of the game I was mostly skipping enemies in the levels unless it made it easier to progress without the enemies being annoying.
This game has an upgrade system using the coins collected by both beating enemies and the coins collected throughout the sliding sections. I would normally praise a game for being willing to have an upgrade system but most of the upgrades besides health and melee damage raises feel so meaningless that I don’t even know why it's present. I genuinely don’t even know what the gadget upgrades do because I never used them. They’re so expensive that they don’t feel worth upgrading. The manual doesn’t properly explain them either but it does mention “WhoBob WhatPants” is coming to DVD in October of 2008. Yipee?
Overall this game was much worse than I expected it to be as I remembered it being quite decent at the ripe young age of about 6 or 7 years old. To end off with a positive I will admit the game is quite short, only being about 4 and a half hours long to beat. I beat it in a single afternoon and for the purpose of playing a game to see if the Homebrew Channel’s Wii iso launcher worked properly it was completely fine. But as an actual game to play it was quite bad even with a positive SpongeBob bias being a real factor. The DS version of this is a real video game I remember being good unlike this one
4/10
The first thing you notice going into this game is how bad the cutscene graphics are. They are almost notoriously bad and look uncanny compared to the previous games. It made me wonder if maybe this aspect came from not having all the previous assets (it's made in a different engine). Some sound effects are reused from the older games (I specifically noticed Spongebob’s jumping sound from Toybots) but all the voicework is fine and quite solid. There are some moments with an incredibly rocky framerate but it is mostly fine.
The strength of these games usually comes from the character interactions and this game has quite a bunch of these with some fun interactions in cutscenes (but not really during gameplay). The main gimmick of this game is combining the heroes and villains of different franchises for each level. Criticism has been made in the past of Fairly Odd Parents not being in this game but I honestly prefer having Zim here. It's interesting (I am not sure Dib is a villain, but I have not seen the show). Tak being in this game still is kind of insane but I guess the show was still airing at the time.
Toybots had a wide variety of characters in it (even some 90s nostalgia characters) but not a ton of variety to be seen here. Every character in this game feels the exact same to play with, it's all just basic 3 hit combo, a special move (a “gadget attack”) that weakens an enemy so it could be killed in one hit (every character has this but they use a different method) and a “gadget combo”, a super move that also uses the Wii’s motion control to activate that I never used once in the game (I imagine it uses the analog stick on the PS Editors Note: it involves doing a combination of button presses??? What is this nonsense?). I’m looking at the PS2 release’s manual at the moment and I noticed the game doesn’t even use the circle button on that console. This game reeks of something developed for the Wii and lazily ported to the PS2 (the game’s control scheme works oddly well on the Wii).
This gameplay itself is quite shit! It turns out this boring 3 hit combo is much more worth using than the gadget attack that has relatively shoddy hit detection. The 3 hit combo also feels horrible to use. It seems to love to auto target? Which is weird for a melee attack but it loves to automatically bring you to whatever is closest which at some points. In some moments you fight these big goo enemies near the end of a level and have to specifically hit it in the middle to hurt it. It’s not always on the ground however so you have to wait for it to drop down. It can’t drop on you because it hurts you and has heavy knockback when it does. So when you attempt to keep a distance and hit from closer to the outside, it autotargets to the legs of this goo creature! This creature also spawns more typical enemies. Hooray! More enemies for the melee attack to auto target instead of the main part you want to hit. So when you are trying to keep a distance it auto targets to the legs of the creature that doesn’t harm it. This felt completely infuriating at moments, especially the first time I encountered these enemies. This even applies to smaller groups of enemies; it's a bewildering choice for a beat 'em up.
There is ““platforming”” in this game but it is absolutely terrible as well. This game doesn’t feel designed to have any sort of platforming. There are many moments where the game's automatic camera will be in the worst positioning possible. So many leap of faiths are made in the game that are not fun. I really wish you could rotate the camera, maybe it could have been done with the DPad that is only used for activating the “gadget combo” (The 1 and 2 buttons on the remote are entirely unused!) Another problem for the platforming is that when you need to do any sort of precision, it's incredibly hard to know where your jump is going to be for a combination of two reasons. The first is because the camera is always at a horrible angle for platforming and the second is that your shadow is so tiny that it doesn't actually help you when the camera is in a weird angle.
Each level of the game opens up with you entering a portal that you have to slide through a little obstacle course to enter the actual level. It's an odd system but it has a lot of the coins for the stupid “upgrade system" I will discuss later. It just doesn’t feel right in this game. All of these slides feel identical to play in with nothing special here. The actual level designs are lackadaisical feeling so boring where despite having charm graphically as well as little references in the background they are a slog to go through. Levels are usually around 10 minutes or so long on average and mostly consist of just fighting enemies (who you can mostly skip over for the record) and the “platforming” mentioned above. However, when one of these levels just keeps going on it can drive you nuts. The second level of Danny Phantom’s world was almost half an hour long. I was in disbelief at how long it was taking to beat because it was just so boring. By the end of the game I was mostly skipping enemies in the levels unless it made it easier to progress without the enemies being annoying.
This game has an upgrade system using the coins collected by both beating enemies and the coins collected throughout the sliding sections. I would normally praise a game for being willing to have an upgrade system but most of the upgrades besides health and melee damage raises feel so meaningless that I don’t even know why it's present. I genuinely don’t even know what the gadget upgrades do because I never used them. They’re so expensive that they don’t feel worth upgrading. The manual doesn’t properly explain them either but it does mention “WhoBob WhatPants” is coming to DVD in October of 2008. Yipee?
Overall this game was much worse than I expected it to be as I remembered it being quite decent at the ripe young age of about 6 or 7 years old. To end off with a positive I will admit the game is quite short, only being about 4 and a half hours long to beat. I beat it in a single afternoon and for the purpose of playing a game to see if the Homebrew Channel’s Wii iso launcher worked properly it was completely fine. But as an actual game to play it was quite bad even with a positive SpongeBob bias being a real factor. The DS version of this is a real video game I remember being good unlike this one
4/10