The introduction sets the mood right away, in such a way that it is completely missing. After an – admittedly short – loading screen, I gain control of SpongeBob and the adventure begins in what mostly feels like an episode already halfway into season five, rather than the game giving me any introduction to Bikini Bottom and its inhabitants. I suspect confusion and wonder if the developers at Purple Lamp are not even going to make an effort to pretend attract someone not yet already saved Spongebob fan…
But anyhow. Due to a misunderstanding, SpongeBob and Patrick Starfish happen to come across a bottle of magic soap, and without really understanding the consequences of blowing magic bubbles, they soon open up seven portals to parallel worlds. They must now collect jelly to set everything right, bring back their missing friends and restore the cosmos in this chaos. Bikini Bottom then becomes, not unlike the castle in Super Mario 64, a hub world for accessing the respective parallel world (or simply platforming).
These courses boast often classic, but unfortunately somewhat tired variations on themes such as the Wild West, Halloween and Knight’s Castle, but also significantly more creative ones such as filming in a prison. The graphic design of them varies, from sometimes quite charming views with pastel color contrasts, to dull and unrefined gray corridors. Technically, The Cosmic Shake is at a consistently low level, with 60 frames per second feeling more like an absolute minimum than a lovely bonus.
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On each of the courses, a gimmick is introduced, and it is mainly through them that the gameplay itself shines. For example, at said prison, SpongeBob learns to karate kick, and when in a cutscene with fixed camera angles, I kick my way through a platform challenge and get to see SpongeBob’s matches to karate legs in profile – then I really gag. And I don’t often do that, actually. With slick deliveries by the voice actors and the same kind of silly tired and dry humor that is the show’s signature, it’s hard to do anything else – but laugh? That high and loud? It does not happen.
Between the more unique gimmicks, Spongebob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake suffers from a basic boring game mechanic that just doesn’t deliver and covers everything that actually works. What the cartoon often did so well by appealing to both young and old, both children and their parents, is completely blown away here. The battles against waves of simple enemies demand nothing of one and are not even engaging from the start, and the level design and platforming challenges are not only unimaginative and repetitive, they are often far too long and simple.
For example, I remember the first course where I was asked to get cactus juice. I giggled a bit at first when in a minigame I was forced to catch up with Sandy the squirrel, but once I went out and extracted probably eight or nine cacti it was hard to motivate myself to continue. Two or three would have been enough. I sort of just want to cope with the challenges to get on to the next, far too sporadic dialogue or film sequence to get me another small dose of old-time Saturday morning cartoons on TV. Dare I say that a game set underwater should have been wary of being called watered down…
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It’s simply how the cartoon/movie SpongeBob does it best – or maybe at all. Had this adventure starred any other, lesser-known character, publisher THQ wouldn’t have bothered for a second to finance the game. Without SpongeBob’s charming matchstick-thin legs, The Cosmic Shake wouldn’t have been able to stand on the stool for a second. And that only makes it extra annoying that Purple Lamp doesn’t make better use of the already well-established, smock-filled Bikini Bottom world. In principle, all of the game’s seven parallel worlds could have appeared in any anonymous and money-grubbing Crash Bandicoot/Spyro game from the late 00s.
With its easy difficulty, boring core mechanics, low ambition level, obvious focus on already redeemed fans, and only sporadic highlights in silly gimmicks and in the dynamic between SpongeBob and his friends, I can’t recommend Spongebob Squarepants: The Cosmic Shake to anyone but… redeemed , underage fans. And I don’t belong to them.
