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

As a big fan of Drinkbox’s previous games in the Guacamelee franchise I was pretty eager to try out Nobody Saves the World. It was initially revealed as an Xbox console exclusive which definitely disappointed me, but I was okay with it, I had a feeling it would become a multiplatform game. This period apparently took literally 3 months lmao but I simply did not notice because it turns out, I had better games to play (MLB The Show addiction).
I guess I forgot about the game until I saw it appear on this month’s Playstation Plus games. I let out a “lets fucking go never punished” or something to that extent. I wouldn’t even have to pay for the game.I had heard rumors of it being a roguelike or something like that and I think that was what offput me from fully committing to playing the game.
Going into the game itself I had almost no idea of what the gameplay of it would be. I didn’t watch any reviews or pay attention to trailers. However what came across to me eventually while playing was that thank god, this was just a normal dungeon crawling action RPG. I felt it was quite evocative of 2D Zelda in the gameplay. You play as a formless character quite literally called “Nobody” a wizard who can transform into different creatures The game also feels a bit like Binding of Isaac without the twin stick stuff in the ways the dungeons exist. However, the true draw I felt playing the game was through the upgrade system. Each form is given a bunch of tasks to complete in order to upgrade its level to the max where more skills can be unlocked. These are all done in the form of a checklist making these upgrades feel like a collectathon in the best way.
Another very interesting part of the game’s combat system is the skills your characters can use. Forms have 1 signature attack they must have followed by up to 3 other slots to use for skills and attacks. Additionally you could have multiple passive slots (level ups bring them up to 4 but you start with 2) to gain passive abilities to benefit whichever situation you are in. Well initially customization with these characters is limited but with enough upgrading, these characters can have custom built builds for tasks a dungeon will present. Sometimes a dungeon will have “wards” who have shields requiring a certain type of attack to break, by customizing your build to account for obstacles like these it provides an element of strategy that makes customizing your build rewarded by the game. What is genius in ways about the tasks you are given to upgrade the characters, is that they actually give good ideas for the player to use in future builds with “Custom quests” needing you to use many different builds to fully upgrade a character.
New Game+ goes even further with this customization with dungeon modifiers as they are called being affected. One particularly dastardly modification I had to deal with was that every attack you dealt would cause mini homing rockets to be shot at you. So I had to do the equivalent of deck building to figure out the best combo involving the equivalent of a damage shielding passive and some abilities from the ghost character on the slug character who sort of functions like a rapid fire moving turret.
The artstyle of the game is quite charming, feeling like an average children’s cartoon with thick linework. The animation work in the games cutscenes, while limited, is completely serviceable for the game this is present in. It is a drastic departure from both the Guacamelee games and Severed (A game I have played about an hour of. It was a neat hour of gameplay) but it ends up working pretty well.
The story of the game itself feels pretty weak with it probably not being the focus. Guacamelee’s story in general was sort of weak but nothing in it felt truly cringe besides maybe the dated memes. The dialogue in particular to me feels a bit groan worthy with what I would consider out of place mild swearing. Damn is a commonly used word and I truly don’t give a shit about cursing but it just felt out of place in the dialogue.
The difficulty curve of the game is a bit weird with the final boss feeling like an easy breeze compared to the dungeon I had previously played. The New Game+ as a whole also experienced a similarly odd difficulty curve because of the randomization of the dungeon modifications. There were early game “demi dungeons” that felt much harder than the big dungeons in that version of the campaign.
As a whole I thought the game beat my relatively muted expectations and kept me gripped enough to commit to this gameplay loop all the way through and beat it in a little under a week. My game rating scale might be fucked up because I am giving this game the same score as Spider-Man 2 despite that game being a lot better. Don’t care
8/10

I remember playing the original Marvel’s Spider Man (2018) on Christmas Day that year when I got my brand new PlayStation 4. This game was not technically the system seller for me (I think half of my reason for getting it was wanting to play Ratchet and Clank (2016) a game I don’t even think I like that much), but I still really wanted to play it. I almost have a rose colored tint to my experience playing that game. I enjoyed playing it that morning while also booting up some Super Meat Boy (I think I had bought it on PSN for a dollar previously. I had played it before.) and Crash Bandicoot from the N Sane trilogy (Which I still have not meaningfully played). Judging by my PSN trophy history I also enjoyed some Spyro the Dragon from that collection. These were the tales of a Nintendo-core PS4 owner. Only truly there for mascot platformers. I also got Dragonball FighterZ that day according to a photo I took of the “Christmas haul”. I have maybe played an hour of that game total.
My point here is that the original Spider-Man PS4 (which I will refer to as “2018”) from here on out functioned to me as a mascot platformer. Despite it falling into a lot of the typical Ubisoft-esque open world trappings like revealing the map over time through radio towers, some skill trees and absurd amounts of collectibles, the movement system keeps that game alive. The combat system as well as it truly is about how you use it. You could just abuse the web shooters and throw enemies to walls a lot (what I remember doing then mixing with the swing kicks). The game felt flawless to me in a non critical sense. It really made you “feel like Spider-Man”.
I did play a decent chunk of Miles Morales, but dropped it around 3/4s of the way through, a common trapping I have with many modern video games despite that game being very short. There’s a not so brief history on my experiences with these games. I hope the anecdotes were fun because it's time for the real review.
I saved obtaining this game until Christmas of 2023 almost eerily similar to how I handled the first game but for very different reasons. I knew that I would not have time to play it during a crowded college semester. I would say that I have essentially no-lifed playing this game since New Years Eve, beating it about 4 days later. I have heard people complain about the game being “too short”. This is a good thing. Games that are too bloated are not the most enjoyable. I say this having 100% completed Spider-Man 2. The open world map is much bigger than the original yet I feel like the amount of collectibles present is much more varied with a lot more options. I was a fan of the Mysteriums for example and kind of wished there were more challenges like that. The stealth bases of “The Flame” were pretty fun side missions as well. These are basically just repackaged versions of the original side missions, but having them be on a much more spread out map makes it feel a lot less like busywork, it feels like you’re actually going to places.
I must discuss the technical prowess of this video game that I noticed while playing. Right off the bat I would like to thank the gods that Insomniac finally went back to allowing their games to run at 60 FPS (Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart did this as well) because it all feels so fluid to control. I don’t have a 4K television so I do not mind running my game in “performance mode”. Insomniac are essentially masters of the Playstation 5’s technology. The first big story mission with Black Cat’s magic portals was absolutely bananas. There are parts I do not want to spoil but the fact those portals just load completely new environments with no load times is crazy cool. It was like Rift Apart’s gimmick on hyperdrive. Load times themselves are almost non-existent in the game in general. Fast Travel which I have to admit, I used a bit, is so absurdly fast. There is no loading time, you just get transported instantaneously. The only load times I can think of in this game are when you switch between Peter and Miles and even then it's like a second or two.
This game is pretty functionally similar to the original game except a few key differences. The game keeps the ability system added from Miles Morales into Peter’s moveset initially starting him with the ability to use mechanical spider arms to get some combos going. Miles gets his powers from the previous game as well. Eventually new twists are brought into these abilities with Miles having the ability to use blue lightning abilities that feel more crowd control adjacent but still useful and Peter get the symbiote which makes you feel unstoppable using it. Traversal is also almost identical with the huge exception of the brand new “Web Wings” which I started off not really liking feeling it almost trivialized the web swinging. I just felt they should not be able to essentially fly. Web swinging was enough for me. Eventually however, I caved and started mixing the web wings into my traversal and my god, you can go so fucking fast with those wings. Honestly a great addition to the formula when used in moderation.
I want to shout out the use of the controller’s gimmicks in this game. Something that is sort of underappreciated about the DualSense is the adaptive triggers. On most games I play on the console (MLB The Show is my main one), it almost never uses that feature and when it does, it is quite odd. But this game uses them in such a natural way combining with the haptic feedback to create such an interesting control experience in stuff like unlocking those vaults.
Now I guess I’ll talk about the campaign and story which I thought was good but nothing too special. I remarked in notes I made about the “moviefication” of AAA video games. This feels like it's not trying to be a prestige film like some AAA games are but more of a completely fine superhero plot which does work for the game this is. However, there are so many moments where I kind of got bored with what it was doing. The moment that brought me to this “moviefication” idea was when we got a needledrop of The Shins’ New Slang. Why do video games have needle drops now? It distracted me for a second playing out while Peter and Harry reminisced while shooting hoops in their old high school gym. A moment that has an option to use tilt controls to shoot the basketballs. What is going on in gaming where moments of games that feel more movie-like need to have “gameplay”. There’s moments where you control Peter riding a bike while holding a conversation in that segment as well. Any time you control Peter by himself without being Spider-Man you get that same cinematic view type stuff that God of War (2018) has. There’s moments that use the medium of gaming in pretty cool ways for more traditional stories here. The side mission where you play as Miles’ deaf friend and the audio is very muffled and doesn’t allow you to hear anything is a very cool effect. There’s not really many moments like that of full immersion present here. In terms of the actual main plot it’s fun Spider-Man fare even though I did find myself a bit lost on some of these characters. I did not play the DLC for the original game which had me quite confused at points but I figured it out. The Miles Morales plot does feel pretty underdeveloped overall and Peter’s plot also feels a bit under developed too. The moments of combat during the campaign are of course fun but you leave it feeling a bit confused that it was already over. I beat the final boss and kept expecting another phase to appear until I realized, I was watching about 20 minutes of ending cutscenes and post credits scenes building up plotlines for the followup games that, according to Insomniac’s leaks, are coming within the next 3 years or so.
I also realized after ending the game and fully completing most of it during the campaign, that there is basically no post game content here at all, which I thought was kind of odd. I know that New Game+ is coming in an update at some point so I guess I am looking forward to playing that in a few months when I want to revisit the game.
While the second half of this review did feel incredibly negative, that traversal system and combat system carries the game so hard that if the story was complete garbage, I don’t think I would care that much because the gameplay is elite. That is my general gaming philosophy as a whole, the story can be great (maybe even function in gameplay in a gripping manner), but it needs to be fun to play and this game heavily delivers on that expectation.
8/10

Playing this game feels kinda odd. It's a Tetris game that clearly precedes whatever insane "guidelines" the Tetris Company came up with by the 2000s. The game feels like it's balanced around gobbling up quarters with it having some absurd difficulty levels even on "normal mode" (could only imagine the hard mode).
The game loves handing you piece after piece after piece of the same one at points (even in the endless mode where there's no "battles"). It feels like the random number generator isn't as forgiving as "modern" Tetris. But wow this game looks visually incredible. Not bothering with any sort of 3D gameplay allows the power of the 2d graphics to pop. The soundtrack is kinda crazy at points going in a lot of directions. The story felt a little nonsense but apparently the Mickey one is last chronologically and I'm not playing all 4 campaigns.
Apparently this shares a director with Zelda's 2D Capcom games and also Breath of The Wild and Tears of the Kingdom?? I didn't realize this before playing and huh it's his directorial debut. I'm a sucker for puzzle games so I enjoyed this. Shame it didn't get an American release on PS1 so I had to play this at 50 FPS due to Mickey Mouse (haha) "PAL" monitors. Running a game at 50 Hz makes you not a real country.
7/10

A Hat in Time is one of those games where I had heard about it for many years. From its launch in 2017, I had heard buzz about how this and other 2017 games were signaling a return of the collectathon platformer (ehh don’t think this happened). First the issue for me was that the game wasn’t on Switch and my PC couldn’t run it then I forgot about the game for a little while. A few years later I learned that the game was updated to run at 60 FPS on PS5 which is where I come in vaguely. I saw it was added to Playstation Plus Extra this year and decided: It was time for me to finally try this game.
The gameplay mechanics can feel pretty fun. I like the air diving physics present in HatKid’s moveset. The movement reminds me of Mario Odyssey in ways (these both released the same month). I just like zipping through the air even though it doesn't feel like you can mix and match things. It’s fun to zip around but eventually this movement just becomes a standard of double jump, dive then cancel.
The game clearly wants to be Super Mario Sunshine right down to having little mini platforming levels hidden away as “time rifts” which are arguably some of the most enjoyable parts of the game. The health bar is literally just like Mario Galaxy. A lot of it is a loving Mario homage in ways. It’s truly just an homage to Gamecube/PS2 era platformers which I truly yearn for a comeback that just hasn’t happened yet.
Lots of dialogue in this game could simultaneously be both charming and annoying. It has a sense of humor that feels very internet adjacent that I kind of enjoyed. There’s an ethical consumption under capitalism joke I would not have fully understood in 2017. I found myself to have enjoyed the Battle of the Birds act within the movie studio a lot (to the point that I'm wondering if SpongeBob: The Cosmic Shake took inspiration from it. It's handled a lot better here). There’s a lot of real interesting set pieces in this game as mentioned above.
The game is simultaneously extremely polished but also questionable. I really don't get why sometimes the environment needs to load after a loading screen has happened in a level. I was surprised that on the PS5 the game defaulted to 30 FPS (seemingly it couldn't even run at 60 on the PS4???) though thankfully it was able to run at 60 on the expensive machine. The game feels rough at points anyway some assets just look low res like the little illustrations before each act. The draw distance felt a bit questionable at points for some of these very open roam levels.
There are some issues I have with the gameplay. One of these is that the camera can be pretty wonky at times, sometimes being locked into one place for no reason (I turned off camera assist as well). The Homing attack feels pretty terrible at times. It doesn’t feel intuitive to use and I kind of hated when I had to use it for certain platforming challenges. Otherwise, like I mentioned above I enjoyed the gameplay overall.
The alpine level with the “free roam” has tedious level design. The level is simply not really fun and feels like they just wanted to do something vaguely like Mario 64. I should clarify that actually some of the platforming is kind of fun when you reach the actual missions but some of the designs of getting to these levels are so boring and repetitive. Something clearly happened with this level budgetary wise because it has no dialogue/characters or boss battle in the final act of the chapter. The whole thing feels like it kind of shows a lot of my issues with this game. It has bouts of fun that are present every once in a while but a lot of it when it's not good is bogged down by sort of unfun level design or just aspects that feel unpolished.
The thing is that the level designers are not bad or anything. The Battle of the Birds level exemplifies that these level designers excel at providing linear experiences over some kind of aimless free roam levels like the Alpine Skyline and the Subcon Forest which feels a bit hard to navigate with no real landmarks. These developers love Mario games like Sunshine and Galaxy but I think I prefer when this game tries to revel in its similarities to Galaxy. Ofc Galaxy type is also the preference I have in Mario games but the open ended moments feel weirdly designed with the exception of the intro level of Mafia Town.
I thought the game had a very small amount of levels which at first I was disappointed by but then I realized the game had run its course already. I had enjoyed most of what I had played and was ready to end my journey. I made the decision to 100% the game and get the platinum trophy which was relatively easy. I don’t feel the desire to buy the DLC but I think it was overall a fine game that I think I liked more than I disliked. It’s surprising how my lean is more towards a low 7/10 or a high mixed review. I also thought it was very funny that JonTron was still in the game. He was in both big indie game 3D Platformer revival Kickstarter games that year with him I think getting removed from Yooka but kept here. I imagine all 5 of the people boycotting on ResetEra really helped put a hole in their wallet (I can’t believe he’s still in the game).
7/10

I played this mainly as a tie in to the film "Oppenheimer" considering the atomic bomb connections in the title and it was an excuse to bust out the Cowabunga Collection again. Honestly a pretty okay beat 'em up with my issues mainly stemming from the difficulty (they had to sell rentals to Blockbuster after all). I really liked a lot of the mechanics but when I learned you can spam Super attacks at the bosses it did feel kind of unsatisfying in ways. Jump kicking in the air is incredible feeling (just like the original arcade game) and idk why the other 2012 series beat 'em up game didn't have them. Cool soundtrack, fun bosses and a kind of bonkers plot made it worth playing. I should have turned on the unlimited lives feature in the enhancements menu beforehand whoops. The achievement for beating the game is a play on the destroyer of worlds quote lmfao.
7/10

I’ve played the other versions of Atlantis Squarepantis but never the one for the Game Boy Advance. Obviously, it’s a bit nuts a GBA game was even released in 2007 but that was par for the course for THQ licensed games. I think they had a Ratatouille game on basically every console on the market back then.

Altron is a company that hasn’t made too many SpongeBob games, but they did do a lot of Nickelodeon ones (I remember really liking Freeze Frame Frenzy). Most of their SpongeBob games are pretty good. Their Truth or Square game for the DS is a very fun 3D platformer that builds on the fundamentals set by their previous DS game…the game based on Atlantis Squarepantis. This game feels like it's trying to mesh elements from that DS game into a 2D platformer where it maybe doesn’t make much sense. Notable funny differences include the addition of an experience points system to upgrade HP (something that only mattered by the time the final boss was reached where I died multiple times because of the difficulty spike) and the genre in that the DS one is a bit more beat-em-up like.

The game is relatively short (I’ve seen people say 2 and a half hours it took me about 4) but for what it is it isn’t bad. I had some issues with the game design however, a lot of it felt very tedious. For whatever reason the developers felt the game needed a team up mechanic (sort of akin to Sonic Advance I would imagine, a game I have not played) so each pairing needs to be constantly swapped to get past gates to clear obstacles you have to constantly backtrack to. This isn’t the worst thing in the world in the first section of the game where you’re only doing some backtracking (The structure is that there are 3 mini worlds that are sort of open-ended but linear; it's odd). It gets much worse in the third world where it seems like half the time you’re playing the game is spent trying to unlock doors, realizing you don’t have the right character combo, backtracking to the character switching location, (why this couldn’t have been a separate menu who knows) then unlocking a singular door before repeating the process all over again. I described this as “zigzag like” in my notes. Just a lot of weird level design choices present here for a game that is supposed to be handheld with no battery save functionality. I don’t know how they did it but somehow a GBA game was released in 2007 that had a password system fucking lol thank god for emulators.

One of the oddest sections of the game is in World 2 where the game seems to love having minigames within the levels. These are team up events where you will do things like play a Breakout minigame thats absurdly annoying with Patrick and Mr. Krabs, a mini game where Patrick and Sandy do a snowboarding level that feels like the one from Mega Man 8?? There’s a minigame where you control Mr Krabs as if he’s a Micro Machines car (I have never played those games.) These are not actual minigames of course, because the game has those too (the real minigames are alright though some are confusing when on a keyboard and not on an actual console.)

I have quite a few positives regarding the game as well. One thing that immediately stands out is the very nice spritework done by the folks at Altron. They’re mostly pretty well animated and there’s lots of fun gags present in the idle animations (Mr. Krabs has one where he’s in his ticket booth from the special for example.) The music in the game is pretty sick because a lot of it comes from the DS game (I don’t know which game came first in development or if they were designed to be similar thematically). The game ran incredibly smoothly at a nice 60 FPS and felt pretty good to control. I didn’t dislike playing it, I just had some massive issues with its game design principles. It is still much better than the television special it is inspired by (a special that is essentially just the characters walking around Atlantis). Overall not a bad game but one that kind of disappointed me in ways. It might be the best GBA SpongeBob game however (The first two WayForward games might be better actually). I think the game deserves a low 7/10 or so because SpongeBob bias and I still enjoyed it.
7/10

Reviewing this game under the PS2 entry even though I played it on Wii because the Wii version has almost no ratings and is the same game.
The game is bad. It's some kind of very odd minigame collection that can vary in quality wildly. I remember the opening segment where you do some kind of puzzle level in the cave with SpongeBob and Patrick took me way too long to figure out. Of course in this version, the entirety of the controls are mapped to motion controls on the Wii Remote rather than using buttons. I think the photography levels are fun in that they seem like a clone of what Pokemon Snap is like (I desperately need to play that game). The driving levels are pretty bad because they simply don’t feel fun to control.
The funniest minigame that is baffling is how a high amount of the levels within this game are something I would describe as “button tapping”. They’re clearly supposed to be “rhythm levels” but the whole thing feels like there’s no sense of rhythm. Half the time you’re just tapping buttons that are shown on the screen. It is so crazy that the grand finale of the game is literally just a button tapping game where the amulet is being sent away or whatever.
I remember some of the unlockable mini games were relatively fun. It seems this game wants you to 100% the levels and repeat them over and over again or something because the unlockable content seemed to be immense but I never went back to get all of this. It reminds me of Blitz’s other SpongeBob game where they locked the final level behind finding every “Sleepy Seed” (another game I never fully completed). I have heard rumors of a commentary track on every level for this one???
This is based on one of the worst SpongeBob specials and yeah you can kinda tell how shambles this game is. They needed to whip something up to fill a flimsy big budget 44 minute special and ended up with a lazy minigame collection from developers who have clearly shown they can do better (even with this franchise). If I remember correctly, this game even reuses some music from “Creature From The Krusty Krab”. This isn’t even the best game based on Atlantis Squarepantis somehow. After replaying this a few years ago I gave my copy to a friend of mine and I don’t think he liked the game either lmao.

4/10

I have been doing a marathon of the Disney direct to video sequels and decided to play one of the games based on them. I was surprised by how this had almost identical gameplay to other Vicarious Visions GBA games (The Shrek 2 game might be a reskin of this.) It is pretty generic and the level design is stale. These levels feel like they are made around being able to move both characters at once but you have to move both individually. I think the game has an oddly abrupt difficulty spike around the halfway point but it just kind of remains passable. Wouldn't recommend it but I could see someone having some fun if they had to play it.

I've played this twice in two different ways. I played it once on the Wii back in the day and finished it and then played it on emulator where I never finished it but found myself having a good time playing it. Its sort of an odd game as a precision platformer in 3D. It feels way more challenging than it should be but that was an aspect I enjoyed about the game. The character selection is kind of neat as well. Always thought it was odd they made one of these not be a co op action adventure game but I don't have siblings I don't care.