When one has to be critical of a title whose target audience is primarily the under-fourteen, one runs the risk of assuming or borrowing certain concepts from other more mature titles and thinking that their absence can be negative. To avoid this, there are several ways to analyze it: either you sit next to a child who is playing with you, or you let yourself become that child for a few hours.
It sounds easier than it sounds, but luckily with SpongeBob: The Cosmic Shake, taking on the kid role with one of its early platformers was pretty easy, and that’s mainly because Purple Lamp Studios It has given us a fun, varied adventure with a good design both in its gameplay and in its art, ending it with the original voices of the animated series of each country. An attention to detail that not only makes it one of the best SpongeBob games, but also one of the most entertaining platforms of recent times.
Let’s go by parts. In The Cosmic Shake we follow in the footsteps of the inseparable duo of friends SpongeBob and Patrick Starwho live peacefully in Bikini Bottom. During a visit to the carnival, SpongeBob grabs a magical bobble with the ability to grant wishes to its bearer if the bearer is pure in heart. The square resident starts blowing compulsively and taking out soap bubbles, offers his best friends (the main characters of the series, such as Mr. Krebs, Calamardo O sandstone) her biggest dreams. But by abusing his power, the fabric of reality begins to tear and the catastrophe destroys much of the seabed, which caused many of its residents to disappear. Everything is in the hands of SpongeBob and Patrick (now transformed into a balloon that follows us everywhere) who must close the gaps to other dimensions, save their friends and leave Bikini Bottom as it was.
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With that premise, it’s clear we’re about to experience an adventure that could have been the skeleton for an entire season of the series if it had connected chapters. Each crack takes us to another world (like the Wild West, where kung fu movies were shot, or the pirates, to name a few, which are like thematic reinterpretations of SpongeBob’s world) and in each of them you will become jump, slide and get new skills that will allow us to advance further to save the trapped character, after which the damage will be reversed.
And to advance, the first thing to do is jump. I’m not exaggerating when I say that SpongeBob: The Cosmic Shake has a platforming element that any player will find satisfying and entertaining. Not as challenging as Crash Bandicoot, but not as successful as Mario or the latest Ratchet and Clank. SpongeBob has several aces up his sleeve to overcome any obstacle, and new mechanics are added with double jumping and bubble shooting, allowing you to unlock new areas (and revisit previous ones in search of secrets, with the consequent approach to metroidvania). Some are particularly fun, like the flying kick or the pirate hook, but in general they are all familiar systems and seen in many other games, here covered with a good layer of Nickelodeon.
In addition, there are a number of enemies created with the rift that will not make it easy for us and there will be some fights in mini arenas that will add an extra point to the challenge that will add to the joy of going through the huge environments to go in the cosmi shake. Also, we can see The Cosmic Shake again as an approach to the action game genre, because in addition to encountering many different types of enemies, each of them requires a different approach to defeat them.
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The whole design respects and recalls the original cartoons and to top it off, the spectacle with the original voices brings us back with a constant smile at every step (although certain general comments are limited with some actions and therefore very repetitive). . The humor doesn’t seem forced, but it also turned out to be the perfect guiding element of the adventure in which SpongeBob is deeply involved as he plays his “thematic” part in each of the locations he visits.
Aside from being an aesthetic element, it’s the overall theme of the collection of costumes and appearances for SpongeBob pretty much irrelevant, and that clouds the replayability of the levels a bit. With each mechanic there might be a small area that we can reach in the ones we’ve already completed, but if it’s just about looking for a costume, it’s not particularly encouraging either. Similarly, the bubbles and other in-game currencies aren’t very useful, and it seems they’re “because they have to be” more than anything else.
I don’t think it’s hard for any player to watch the end credits in The Cosmic Shake without breaking a sweat. The game is fully accessible and the mini-tutorial system is so easy to assimilate this mechanic. And besides, the game is perfectly polished without finding any bugs or graphic glitches that would affect it even a little bit. To get a little “but” on performance, the Switch version felt like it had some slightly longer loading screens by today’s standards. But since SpongeBob: The Cosmic Shake isn’t coming out on the new generation of consoles, I won’t be considering it either (especially when Swithch’s handheld game looks and responds so well).
SpongeBob was incredibly fun to watch, even for someone like me from a generation before his TV success. A well-rounded platformer that’s fun for the whole family, The Cosmic Shake offers a fantastic take on multiple game genres that young gamers will later encounter. And doing it hand-in-hand with Bob and Patricio is, in a word, hilarious.
