Fans of Nickelodeon’s iconic square-pants hero will almost agree that Battle for Bikini Bottom is the best SpongeBob game ever. Nearly 20 years later, the developer Purple Lamp Studios brought him back with a complete remake, but it was clear that fans wanted something fresh. The team’s response is SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. This is a game that takes the gameplay of the 2020 remake and adds a unique idea. result? This feels like a remake of a PS2-era platformer that never existed.
It follows the same design found in Battle for Bikini Bottom, giving the game an old school feel. Like a fan favorite 20 years ago, Cosmic Shake lets you explore a simple hub world with a few relatively large levels branching off. SpongeBob feels in control just like before, but with some new tricks this time. It also features Tiki crates, a large slide section, and several boss encounters. If you’ve played the remake a few years ago, you have a rough idea of āāwhat to expect in terms of gameplay.
Instead of using bus stops to get to each stage, you’ll use large portals to warp to another dimension in Bikini Bottom. That’s because SpongeBob got a magical soap bubble wand that grants wishes. Of course, he goes a little crazy. His wish confuses his homeworld with a dimensional rift and flings his friends into the real world ā even Patrick is caught in the chaos and turned into a balloon. You are tasked with retrieving lost companions and fixing things.
It’s a good excuse to offer several different levels with neat themes. We visit the Wild West, movie sets, and the Stone Age, but SpongeBob always has the right costume. Each level location borrows something from the manga series, making him seven different and fun environments familiar to fans of the show. It’s clear that the developers took as much, if not more, inspiration from the series than its predecessor.
As previously mentioned, the platforming and combat mostly adhere to the blueprints used for the Battle of Bikini Bottom Rehydrate. SpongeBob’s double jump, stomp, and basic spin attack are all here and feel good enough to pull off. New abilities include gliding, aerial hand kicks, bubbles that can activate certain switches or temporarily trap enemies, and swinging from a fishing hook. These additional abilities are delivered one at a time, giving your adventure a great sense of progression. There are some parts that are a little awkward, such as the hook swing, but once you get used to it, it’s fine.
The fact that you’re slowly accumulating new abilities means there’s a reason to revisit past levels. Each stage has a secret or alternate path that you can’t navigate first, so if you want to see everything and run through it, you’ll have to follow the steps once SpongeBob is powered on. It grows and changes over time, introducing small challenges and mini-games.
Speaking of revisiting stages, Hub characters also offer side quests. I will give it to you. Golden Doubloons are a reward and can also be found at each level and are used to unlock more SpongeBob costumes for him. There are dozens of these, and they’re purely cosmetic, but almost all of them lifted from the series, which is a nice bonus for fans.
Jelly can be found throughout each level, and thousands of jellies can be collected by breaking tiki and killing enemies. Jelly’s sole purpose is to purchase unlocked costumes, so you’ll end up with tons of surplus items. Some shoot at you from a distance, others are large and require multiple hits to kill. SpongeBob’s normal attacks, karate kicks, and ground pound will help you get through each fight, but I found the fights to be more annoying than anything else. Enemies are a pain to fight. Again, feels like a design from a bygone era.
That feeling extends to meeting the boss. Each level ends with some form of boss fight. Those are fine, but not something I want to repeat. I would have been happy with them in 2003. Some are more inspired, such as a western stage tracking Mr. Krabs along a train, or being ordered to serve a cake while a witch attacks from above. The more traditional one, in which you have to jump over expanding shockwaves while fending off bad guys, feels pretty played out.
The adventure is fun enough from start to finish, but the presentation doesn’t do enough to support it. The cuts feel unsettled and the cuts are timing so fast that you barely have time to process what’s shown or the jokes that have just been made. Dialogue is fine, but sometimes includes grotesque close-ups in the show. That’s because there’s just too much of it to have any real impact, it doesn’t feel earned, and it has very little sense of comedy.
Unfortunately, this leads to a topic of bugs. The game is very rough around the edges, with numerous minor issues during 15 hours of playtime. Dialogue occasionally blocked out audio, music was sometimes layered on top of itself, and interactive objects needed to progress temporarily disappeared. leave a mark. The developer has promised to address many issues in a post-launch update, but for now the game is a bit flaky.
Conclusion
SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake is a serious effort to create another great game for its characters, but it doesn’t quite work. There is a clear love for IP with such references and costumes. However, some of the gameplay feels very dated, many presentational flaws and a long list of bugs hold it back. It’s an absolutely fun time, but its overall lack of polish and some play-out designs mean it’s not the sweet win we were hoping for.
