SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake Review
Whether I’m enjoying my favorite memes or going back to rewatch one of the only cartoons I still legitimately laugh at as an adult, it’s hard to understate SpongeBob SquarePants’ influence on my life. Through it all, the porous goofball I’ve known for years feels like the perfect mascot for an over-the-top, cartoonish platformer. While 2003’s SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom proved it could be done, we’ve been in dire need of a modern take on that idea starring everyone’s favorite fry cook. And yet, like a collapsing Squidward Souffle, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake dried up my optimism the more I played: it’s merely a thin, by-the-numbers sequel to the 20-year-old Bikini Bottom rather than the ground-up redesign that absorbs the progress genre heroes like Mario or Ratchet and Clank have made in the decades since that we deserve. So although Cosmic Shake does benefit from the quirky SpongeBob characters and their world, as a platformer it’s a terribly bland journey that feels painfully frozen in time even as the fans of the show that ended eight years ago have continued to age (also painfully).
As I’ve come to expect from this delightful sponge, the story begins when he makes a series of extremely ill-advised decisions which cause the very fabric of Bikini Bottom to be torn apart at the seams. Determined to put things right, SpongeBob and a newly transformed balloon version of Patrick begin hopping through portals and fighting samey jelly monsters in search of their friends. What little plot follows is basically just a thinly veiled excuse to revisit memorable SpongeBob episodes, whether you’re running around the prehistoric version of Bikini Bottom or the creepy depths of Rock Bottom, which is a
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