An honest dev/gamer review of SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. Does the childhood IP carry the game, or is the linear gameplay a massive letdown?
Who the hell would've guessed that, after all these years, the yellow, square-pants-wearing sponge would still be thriving in the 3D platformer meta? Meanwhile, my boy Spyro got completely shelved (yeah, I'm still salty about that). Regardless, with two back-to-back decent releases, it looks like SpongeBob is here to stay. Having grinded Battle for Bikini Bottom (BfBB) back in the day, I had to jump into SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake to see if it’s actually goated or just riding the nostalgia wave.
We can't dissect this 2023 release without paying respects to the OG. Back in 2003, Heavy Iron Studios dropped BfBB, which somehow managed to be a top-tier licensed collect-a-thon in an era filled with garbage movie-tie-in games. Fast forward to 2020, Purple Lamp Studios remastered it, made a fat stack of cash, and THQ Nordic greenlit a brand-new, original sequel: The Cosmic Shake.
The plot is as chaotic as a 2 AM Discord call. SpongeBob and Patrick hit up Glove World, meet a sketchy fortune teller, and buy some "magic bubble soap" made of mermaid tears. Like an absolute noob spamming a newly unlocked skill, SpongeBob blows bubbles to grant his friends' wishes. Obviously, it breaks the fabric of reality. The multiverse tears open, his friends get sucked into alternate dimensions, and Patrick gets nerfed into a literal floating balloon. Time to clean up the mess.
SpongeBob’s moveset got a total rework. The iconic head bash and bubble bowling are gone, replaced by a karate kick, bubble surfboard, and a reef blower. Sounds like a buff, right? Wrong. The abilities feel incredibly conditional. You can only use them when the game explicitly tells you to. There’s no room for big brain speedrun tactics or creative platforming.
The linearity is what really drops the FPS of my excitement. Don't get me wrong, a tight linear game > a bloated AAA open-world walking simulator any day of the week. But the levels here just feel... hollow. You lose that dope open exploration vibe that BfBB nailed. And for a game pitching a "multiverse" concept, the map design is kinda lazy. Aside from Pirate Goo Lagoon, the rest of the alternate worlds just look like the base Bikini Bottom map with a Halloween or Karate mod installed.
Scrolling through the Reddit thread, it’s funny to see gamers collectively realizing we've been blinded by nostalgia.
So, GG or nah? Despite the gameplay being a bit of a snooze fest, it's still a solid game if you grab it on a Steam sale. It's short, charming, and the devs clearly loved the source material.
But for anyone out there coding their own indie project, here's the ultimate lesson: Great art direction and nostalgia can only carry you so far. If your core gameplay loop doesn't evolve or challenge the player, the experience gets stale fast. Don't be afraid to take the training wheels off and let players experiment with the mechanics you spent sleepless nights debugging.
