Review By: breakingthegreen
Posted: 8/30/2024

I was a child once, and when you're a child you need to pick your obsession, and Dr Who wasn't on air again yet, so my early love was Spongebob, I'd watch every episode I could, I'd read the magazine's and I'd also play a tonne of the games. On PS2, I had Revenge of the Flying Dutchman, Lights Camera Pants, and Atlantis SquarePantis. And last but not least by any means, The movie game. I had a few other Nickelodeon ones too, but they weren't as noteworthy. 

 

The Cosmic Shake is the kinda sequel to Battle for Bikini Bottom that was released over 20 years ago and remade back in 2020. I'd never played that game when it first released, but I knew that it by reputation, I did have the Movie game by the same developers which I absolutely loved. So expectations for that game were high... it was disappointing... But that was mostly in part because of the structure was less objective based which made what I was doing feel kinda pointless. Fortunately, much like the movie game, Cosmic Shake is a tad more linear which reduced the pacing issues that I always experience in most open world games.

 

Plot is thus, Spongebob has caused Bikini Bottom to break apart into multiple dimensions which Spongebob needs to enter to save the characters that have got trapped there, these worlds reference previous episodes of the show, like a favourite of mine when I was nine, "Dunces and Dragons." Due to being a spiritual successor to a 20 year old game, I think it's fair to say they prioritised older references, as the only thing I didn't know was the fact that Plankton has a pet amoeba now. 

 

I think as I got older, I forgot how funny I find Spongebob's writing, a line I like is: "What is a Glove, without love?" "I'm going to guess G." And because of this the writing in cutscenes and gameplay has very good timing that made me laugh a fairly large number of times, however, the textbox scenes (the ones where you need to press X to proceed) do lose that timing and I which there was an auto function to make the jokes flow better. 

While most of the jokes I liked, the repeatable dialogue got on my nerves, since it's activated by gliding or collecting the main currency, and they'll be repeated over and over again.

 

Meme! I recognise the meme! 

When I finished the first level I felt like I was doing really badly when I was playing because I'd missed a lot of collectables, but it soon became clear to me that items only became available after unlocking the side quests and there were also buttons I just couldn't interact with yet, so that removed the sting of forcing myself to explore everything right away and I had a tonne more fun. However, the slight frustration that I was failing to find everything was the thing that timed me out of completing this years back.

When going back to the levels to collect all the items and finishing off side quests, there's no indication for where in the level to look, so unless you have perfect recall I would not blame you if you decided to use a guide. There's none of those cryptic descriptors BFBB had which is a massive shame because it was a good way to help the player achieve 100% without mandating assistance from a guide. 

The combat is simple but fun, without the cursory bobs and whistles that made BFBB a pit confusing during fights, however because of that the enemy variety is low and I would have liked more of them.

Platforming is surprisingly challenging too, (not that hard obviously, but harder than I expected), many paths expect you to land on really small blue Tiki heads and it is easy to miss. And the glide is not that much of a boost, so it's much harder to break the game like BFBB was famous for via the speed running community.

There's also a few minigames that you can find, such as shooting galleries and a whack-a-mole section, I wouldn't mention them due to how easy they are but the image of Spongebob delaying saving his friend just because he wants to use a test-your-strength machine is a funny image in my head.

Who needs friends? You could be winning a Plushie!

The main thing that you're working for in this game is costumes, there's a tonne. So much so that I found I hated most of them, but that's just down to the shear number of them, my favourite was the fisherman's outfit and I convinced myself that Bikini Bottom was underneath the boat from Dredge.

Graphically the game looks great, as good as the Sponge on the Run movie at times, and it melds the styles from many previous episodes so well, each level is distinctive and manages to cover a range of genres, from Pirates to Pre-history. These are all nice, but they were all a touch too long, I'd have rather 10 minutes shaved off all the levels and provided a better set of boss fights. 

Yeah the boss fights are a little naff, the second level's boss is by far the best, but too many of the final fights were just punch ups with groups of regular enemies.

Getting the platinum was a tonne of fun, with the exception of collectables, I just read the trophies and was able to remember appropriate locations and completed the challenges; this isn't exactly a hard platinum, it's a fun one, and I like fun platinums the best. 

I had a good time with Cosmic Shake and it's the second best Spongebob title in my eyes behind the movie game. Purple Lamp have proved that they do indeed know what they're doing and are able to do more when they aren't remaking games.