SpongeBob Square Pants: The Cosmic Shake Review for Nintendo Switch

We are probably all aware of those early 2000s games where we were given titles based on popular IP that coincided with an upcoming film or TV show. The common memory we all have with those titles is they kind of sucked am I right? The budgets were too small, the developers didn’t have enough time and in doing so the customer gets a very underbaked product. There were some diamonds in the rough, such as “SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle For Bikini Bottom” which wasn’t perfect but fun enough to leave a lasting impression to a cult audience of gamers who grew up with it. Back in 2020 we got the Rehydrated edition, which was a remastered version developed by Purple Lamp Studios. This time around the studio decided to give it a go on their own with a brand-new SpongeBob game with “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake.” This spiritual successor may have done a bit too good of a job with imitating the likes of the previous game, for some good, but mostly bad.

Our leads SpongeBob and Patrick are given the ability to grant wishes by a mermaid. When SpongeBob naturally gets a little too aggressive with wish-making reality breaks and multiverses are formed. It’s up to SpongeBob and Patrick to go into these seven different wish worlds to set things straight and fix the fabric of reality. Also, Patrick has been conveniently turned into a balloon version of himself, my guess is so he can tag along on the adventure and not be as in the way. The story is frankly all over the place, and motivations throughout quickly stop making sense, but fortunately for games like these, we don’t really come for the story. It’s all about the 3D action and platforming!

So how does the gameplay fare? Well, it’s a functional game for sure, but it’s made to be incredibly easy, obviously a grown adult isn’t the main demographic for a Nickelodeon kids cartoon, what a shocker. The platforming is very straightforward and easy to understand and do, while fighting enemies is embarrassingly easy, there isn’t much of a challenge at all here. The tutorial alerts are very intrusive and excessive, traversal is very hit and miss because there are a ton of invisible walls to areas I’m not supposed to go, but the game doesn’t really do its job conveying I shouldn’t go there. The overall theme here is lack of polish. My concern is did this game have a low budget or was it intended to be this way to mimic the “Battle For Bikini Bottom” game. If they intended to mimic a game that’s twenty years old then they succeeded, but unfortunately as a modern gamer, I have my standards set a bit higher.

I was fortunate to be given a chance to play this title on both the Playstation 4 and the Nintendo Switch, and I will admit this is a better suited title for the Switch. The graphics aren’t anything to write home about, they’re certainly serviceable and the character designs are well done and are full of charisma and life, but this is an easy game to stop and play whenever it’s convenient on the go, so if you are so inclined to check this title out, the Nintendo Switch version wins for that alone. For fans of the show, fortunately a lot of the similar written comedy in the cutscenes do work pretty well and even though the story is all over the place, at least it can still get me to chuckle a little now and then. I guess I’m just a bit let down that the developers didn’t take what they learned from remastering their previous game and created something that was better on every level, not just to match it, flaws, bugs and all. That said, fans of “Battle For Bikini Bottom” and just want more of the same sixth generation style gameplay then “Cosmic Shake” will be exactly what they expected.

6/10

For more information, visit: https://www.thqnordic.com/games/spongebob-squarepants-cosmic-shake

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Nick Navarro

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Gaming since I was given an original Nintendo as a kid. I love great storytelling and unique ingenuity. When both collide in a single game, I'm a happy gamer. Twitter/IG @NickNavarro87