Cosmic Shake is a solid game that felt a bit misguided in its approach as a psuedo-spiritual successor to Battle for Bikini Bottom. Its a fun time, but I put it on equal footing/a twinge below The Movie Game but above Creature from the Krusty Krab.
As far as positives go: the original music was great, the game looked visually stunning, the fanservice to the source material was a delight (excluding the usage of songs from the show), and the game felt really good. Level design was really neat, they were big and encouraged exploration. The weirdness definitely felt like a marriage between BfBB's cohesion and CFTKK's fever dream nature.
In terms of negatives I didn't fully click with Spongebob's moveset. The bubble is situational at best and useless at worst and the glider killing your momentum between platforming really sucked. It's a shame cause I thought the levels were designed pretty well, I just wish Spongebob felt more fun to use than "kinda fun" ya know. Enemy variety was too little and none felt like an obstacle at all which is a shame cause BfBB & Movie Game seemed to understand the challenge curve between them well.
Madam Cassandra & the final boss were a huge missed opportunity. While I do appreciate the final boss throwing a slight nod to a scrapped concept from BfBB, its one of the easiest bosses in the game, it doesn't even really have music, and its a bit of salt on the wound ontop of the game's underwhelming ending. Cassandra was set up as the antagonist but she didn't really have much of a motive. which is weird with that being the case cause the boss of the game's last level had a really good motive, and the boss fight was a bit better.
The presentation like I said, looked gorgeous, but there was some noticeably odd moments where the characters didn't feel animated enough with cutscenes & dialogue., their expressions and mannerisms didn't really match up well with what they had to say at times. As much as I appreciate the fanservice, the game didn't need to include songs from the show in it. Not only did it break my immersion, it just didn't fit in spots where they used the songs, and I personally prefer when licensed games have soundtracks that are adjacent with the source material. Spongebob's videogame track record with music was pretty damn good so I'm not sure why they decided to throw in show songs alongside having a pretty damn solid original OST.
Overall, Cosmic Shake is a fine game with some issues that make it fall short. Spongebob fans will likely get a kick out of it more (and I say this as a Spongebob fan) than those not into Spongebob. But it is a worthwhile playthrough.
Adding a NG+ feature would definitely mitigate the issue I had with the ending...
As far as positives go: the original music was great, the game looked visually stunning, the fanservice to the source material was a delight (excluding the usage of songs from the show), and the game felt really good. Level design was really neat, they were big and encouraged exploration. The weirdness definitely felt like a marriage between BfBB's cohesion and CFTKK's fever dream nature.
In terms of negatives I didn't fully click with Spongebob's moveset. The bubble is situational at best and useless at worst and the glider killing your momentum between platforming really sucked. It's a shame cause I thought the levels were designed pretty well, I just wish Spongebob felt more fun to use than "kinda fun" ya know. Enemy variety was too little and none felt like an obstacle at all which is a shame cause BfBB & Movie Game seemed to understand the challenge curve between them well.
Madam Cassandra & the final boss were a huge missed opportunity. While I do appreciate the final boss throwing a slight nod to a scrapped concept from BfBB, its one of the easiest bosses in the game, it doesn't even really have music, and its a bit of salt on the wound ontop of the game's underwhelming ending. Cassandra was set up as the antagonist but she didn't really have much of a motive. which is weird with that being the case cause the boss of the game's last level had a really good motive, and the boss fight was a bit better.
The presentation like I said, looked gorgeous, but there was some noticeably odd moments where the characters didn't feel animated enough with cutscenes & dialogue., their expressions and mannerisms didn't really match up well with what they had to say at times. As much as I appreciate the fanservice, the game didn't need to include songs from the show in it. Not only did it break my immersion, it just didn't fit in spots where they used the songs, and I personally prefer when licensed games have soundtracks that are adjacent with the source material. Spongebob's videogame track record with music was pretty damn good so I'm not sure why they decided to throw in show songs alongside having a pretty damn solid original OST.
Overall, Cosmic Shake is a fine game with some issues that make it fall short. Spongebob fans will likely get a kick out of it more (and I say this as a Spongebob fan) than those not into Spongebob. But it is a worthwhile playthrough.
Adding a NG+ feature would definitely mitigate the issue I had with the ending...