Drake & Josh: Talent Showdown (or simply Drake & Josh on the title screen) turned out to be better than I was expecting. What I was expecting this game to be is a boring rhythm game, and while it does have that aspect, it's a bit more than that.

The game is mostly a top down action game. Your goal is running around rooms and doing objectives such as talking to NPCs or collecting keys or key items for progression. You control Drake & Josh and can switch between them and both have different abilities. Drake is more combat and speed oriented, walking faster and being able to run, as well as use water guns and a fire extinguisher to temporarily incapacitate enemies. Josh is more about sneak, moving slower but being able to play as an innocent to get past the bullies, though this doesn’t work with fangirls who can be encountered late in the game. He is also able to use magic powder to create a stun area for enemies and can use it to break free from bullies. The game uses almost all the buttons, but it’s not without forced touch screen use. When you get caught, you have to wiggle your stylus left and right to break free. It’s annoying to have to switch to the touch screen, though on one hand it does make you want to avoid enemies as much as you can to avoid these situations, but it’s still not fun. Another use of the touch screen is following a path without touching boundaries, which is pretty basic. There’s no annoying time limit like in the GBA game, but you don’t have infinite time. For some reason, your health drains over time, as if someone put a slow and weak but lengthy poison spell on the main protagonists, which also means you can’t beat Drake & Josh: Talent Showdown Without Taking Any Damage. What a shame. You could interpret that the health bar IS a timer, and getting caught by bullies drains it significantly, but c’mon, you don’t refill timer with candy bars. It really is a health bar. There are a few levels where your goal is simply get to the end of the level on a timer (an actual ticking clock and not your health draining faster), or distract people who are trying to sabotage Drake’s performances, or impress them with magic tricks, using aforementioned tracing mini-game. Sometimes instead of Drake you’ll have Megan to play as, who has pretty much the same arsenal, but can’t run, only pretend to be an innocent girl like Josh. You’ll also have levels where you have to repair machines, which is more tracing but also shooting your water gun at a speeny wheel and you'll have to refill your water gun because it takes a lot of water to power. Aside from that there’s not much variety, and the game gets a bit repetitive by the end. There is a boss battle encountered twice, which is just a big bully who’s super fast, takes longer to shake off and isn’t very much fun to deal with. The strategy is to anger them with a water gun spray, then trip them with magic powder. The magic powder is limited, though there is refill, I don’t know if there’s a way to refill it infinitely as I didn’t pay enough attention to what the game was saying about that but whatever. The “boss” isn’t very fun anyway. As I mentioned before, what I expected, a rhythm mini-game, is there and you’ll have a few of these throughout the game, and these are as generic as they can get.

The graphics once again use 3D environments, which look ok, but I can’t shake off a feeling, that the game is constantly on a minor slowdown, or maybe it’s the way the camera scrolls, I’m not too sure, but I feel like the game isn’t the smoothest performance wise. The music is decent, but there’s not much variety in tracks, so it can get repetitive. Also a few of the tracks remind me of The Sims for some reason. The game is also quite buggy, I managed to softlock twice, once when I got the first rhythm mini-game and the game refused to show me how to play it, and second time when I beat the level, the game showed “Congratulations!” but refused to let me play the next level. Thanfully, I didn’t lose any progress as the game autosaves, allowing me to continue playing, but those aren’t great issues to have. One time a bully slipping on fire extinguisher substance pushed me through a door that you can’t open no matter what, putting me out of bounds. Thankfully, once again I didn’t lose much progress because my objective was to find the hallway that clears the end of the level, and I managed to get myself to said hallway from out of bounds. Lastly, one time the sprites on the touch screen during dialogue started freaking out and flickering. I was lucky that I didn’t lose progress, but those issues show that the game isn’t very polished in terms of glitches, which may point to its rushed production, a lack of budget or time. Y’know, the three things that define any regular licensed game.

Overall, the game is quite average as you’d expect. I think I like this more than Drake & Josh for GBA, simply because this game isn’t as frustrating, but that game is arguably more engaging and has better presentation, so it's not that much better. But this game isn’t the worst still. I didn’t think this game was shitty enough to get less than 3 stars, it still wasn’t a complete borefest, or a complete mess, it was just ok.