A disappointing miscalculation of audience. The Cosmic Shake (TCS) is a spiritual successor to Battle for Bikini Bottom (BfBB) made by Purple Lamp Studios.

In terms of writing, references and voice acting, the game is a great step up from BfBB. Many of the shows writers and voice actors worked closely on this project to deliver on that front.

But when it comes to gameplay, TCS is heavily dumbed down and simplified when it comes to platforming, collectibles and boss difficulty. Usually, I wouldn't mind this since it's obviously a kids game, but Purple Lamp already created the perfect recreation of BfBB in 2020 that was also a financial success.

There's also the fundamental mistake of thinking the main demographic for a spongebob game is still children. The show was hugely popular in the 90s and 2000s, after that it has been a shell of its former self and has lost popularity to competition from Cartoon Network shows. Most people that are still large enough SpongeBob fans are the kids that grew up with it in it's golden days or played BfBB, kids that have grown up to around 14-24 and don't need their hand to be held in a platformer game.

Overall, TCS sadly does not offer much of a challenge to anyone remotely used to a platformer, but for anyone looking for a good entry game to 3D Platformers and you happen to also like SpongeBob, this is a great option.

It was fun!
The world design was lovely for the most part. The medieval world didn't feel at the level of the rest, kinda quickly made and not unique.
The platforming is AWESOME! probably my favorite part of the game. SpongeBob's move set and the level design were quite enjoyable.
My least favorite part has got to be the Latin American Spanish dub. The actual voices were good, but the localization was TERRIBLE. It felt very disjointed and directionless, as if they didn't give the actors context on what was supposed to be happening on the scenes. It felt as if they just gave them a list of lines to read and to read them as they pleased.

Cosmic Shake is a solid game that felt a bit misguided in its approach as a psuedo-spiritual successor to Battle for Bikini Bottom. Its a fun time, but I put it on equal footing/a twinge below The Movie Game but above Creature from the Krusty Krab.

As far as positives go: the original music was great, the game looked visually stunning, the fanservice to the source material was a delight (excluding the usage of songs from the show), and the game felt really good. Level design was really neat, they were big and encouraged exploration. The weirdness definitely felt like a marriage between BfBB's cohesion and CFTKK's fever dream nature.

In terms of negatives I didn't fully click with Spongebob's moveset. The bubble is situational at best and useless at worst and the glider killing your momentum between platforming really sucked. It's a shame cause I thought the levels were designed pretty well, I just wish Spongebob felt more fun to use than "kinda fun" ya know. Enemy variety was too little and none felt like an obstacle at all which is a shame cause BfBB & Movie Game seemed to understand the challenge curve between them well.

Madam Cassandra & the final boss were a huge missed opportunity. While I do appreciate the final boss throwing a slight nod to a scrapped concept from BfBB, its one of the easiest bosses in the game, it doesn't even really have music, and its a bit of salt on the wound ontop of the game's underwhelming ending. Cassandra was set up as the antagonist but she didn't really have much of a motive. which is weird with that being the case cause the boss of the game's last level had a really good motive, and the boss fight was a bit better.

The presentation like I said, looked gorgeous, but there was some noticeably odd moments where the characters didn't feel animated enough with cutscenes & dialogue., their expressions and mannerisms didn't really match up well with what they had to say at times. As much as I appreciate the fanservice, the game didn't need to include songs from the show in it. Not only did it break my immersion, it just didn't fit in spots where they used the songs, and I personally prefer when licensed games have soundtracks that are adjacent with the source material. Spongebob's videogame track record with music was pretty damn good so I'm not sure why they decided to throw in show songs alongside having a pretty damn solid original OST.

Overall, Cosmic Shake is a fine game with some issues that make it fall short. Spongebob fans will likely get a kick out of it more (and I say this as a Spongebob fan) than those not into Spongebob. But it is a worthwhile playthrough.

Adding a NG+ feature would definitely mitigate the issue I had with the ending...

Kind of exactly what you'd expect from a modern Spongebob platformer: Nice 8th Gen spick span and flow, but sorely toothless in the sauce. Just does everything generally worse than BfBB because it's so scared of being even slightly challenging. The shift away from collectathon structure also makes most of the levels extremely repetitive and forgettable. The PS2 movie game still made linear work by way of Goober Tokens and the objectives tied to them. But like, once you beat the main path of each level, there's basically nothing else to do, and said paths are usually hour-long hikes with the same enemies and platform gimmicks.

Wish the humor was up to par, too, 90% of spongebob's dialouge is him making puns out of random shit and patrick obsfucating that wordplay into some dumb lolrandom dredge. Nick still has the same O.G. voice crew working on this, and I respect it, but I think a lot of these guys are ready to retire from this shindig. You can feel Tom Kenny getting seized by coughing fits from straining his voice so high.

And look man, I wouldn't say BfBB has a 'listenable' soundtrack, but it being VG music in the style of Spongebob's stock music fit like a glove. This mobile game orchestral sludge is ass, and throwing in a Sweet Victory or Jellyfish Jam here and there doesn't fix it.

There was basically nothing for me here but I guess it has a nice comfort food flow to it?

SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake is a classic 3D platform game set in the world of SpongeBob. The game was announced as the most important game of this franchise, but it's not what they told us.

Starting with the positive aspects of this game: the characters and their charisma. While the story isn't extremely intriguing, it resembles an episode of the cartoon. SpongeBob and his friends exhibit the same humor that we typically see in the TV show, providing some laughs during gameplay.

Unfortunately, the gameplay is rather boring. I had the impression that I was playing a generic 3D platform game from the PS2 era. There's nothing innovative here, and everything that The Cosmic Shake attempts to do has been done much better in many other games.

The Cosmic Shake targets SpongeBob fans specifically. I'm not one of them, so I had an enjoyable time with it, but that's about it. If you're a devoted fan of this franchise, you'll likely have fun observing the characters' interactions. In conclusion, I recommend considering purchasing this game only if you find it at a significantly reduced price; otherwise, it might not be worth it.

There were quite a few audio bugs during major cutscenes, and some pop-in. The level design is also pretty forgettable compared to BFBB and the Movie game.

It's still fun if you like the previous games, but it definitely feels like people trying to make a platformer from scratch for the first time at certain points. If I'm not mistaken, the developer hadn't really made their own game until this one. They just seem to be fans of BFBB that got to do Rehydrated.

If there's one thing I do love about this game though, it's the music. They really went all out in that respect.

My expectations with Cosmic Shake as a budgeted 3D platformer that doesn’t cost full price is that it would be decent at least and I’m happy to report that the game is wonderful. It has a few problems that makes it feel so low-budgeted, but I would say there is enough heart put into it for a budgeted title that I would recommend if you love to play another colorful 3D platformer.

Now my biggest surprise with this game was the writing. I still think the characterizations are a bit flanderized, but the writing itself made me smile so much on how the character dynamics bounce so well off each other with their dialogues and not having to rely on visual gags as the main substance that is comedy, which unfortunately current SpongeBob suffers from way too much. I haven’t enjoyed this much writing from SpongeBob since like half of season 4 or Sponge Out of Water. They also make a lot of callbacks from early seasons and thankfully most of them don’t feel so forced in except for 2 of them from my experience.

Top all of this with surprisingly well-animated cutscenes are that very expressive, having all the voice actors that still sound great voicing their iconic or even side characters, and having a new brand character for this called Kassandra whiles is a very predictable type of character still a great addition to the cast of characters. This is easily my favorite written SpongeBob adventure in a video game form.


Now as for the gameplay itself, you only play as SpongeBob this time compared to BFBB where you can also play as Sandy or Patrick. That might sound like a downgrade, but they made this up by combining other playable character move sets into SpongeBob for this game and that was honestly such a wise decision because this leads to SpongeBob being way more fun to control compared to the previous games where he was pretty basic due to having to balance previous games around other playable characters to have different move sets each. Now that they can only focus solely on SpongeBob, it's much more satisfying to unlock new moves like the dodge roll, pizza glide, or karate kick that I consistently use for platforming or combat that are engaging. it leads to the level design being very focused and shaking things up enough to feel new, but not ruining the overall flow that is pure platforming, which I do think Movie Game failed at it, and even BFBB to an extent with a few obnoxious objectives.

The game is very linear compared to BFBB and depending on what you expect from this game, I do understand being let down by the lack of openness that is the collectathon structure in BFBB that was well known. However, I can easily swallow that because I do think the level design despite being very linear is still very engaging to go through at least when it comes to the main paths, and isn’t so much of a straight line that it fights against you. There are still enough of these open sections for you to complete main objectives from different points, it has that doughnut shape structure within these level sections where the game lets you complete stuff that eventually leads you back to the main path naturally or find a doubloon that lets you spend on cool unlockable costumes that are callbacks to the past. The structure & level design is consistently well-designed & focused I find to be more fun than BFBB when it comes to the main paths at least. There is also not a single level that I disliked, unlike BFBB where Kelp Forest was just a mess.

The last few things I have to praise before I get into my complaints is that the game looks gorgeous. Environments or characters look so stylized or colorful, each level looks so distinctive. The soundtrack is also very cool, not blowing my socks off, but it was very catchy to listen to during the game.

Now, my biggest complaint with this game is the finale. Not to spoil what exactly happens, but it feels very anticlimactic & the final boss gameplay-wise is a complete joke. Left me soured a bit at the finish lines.

My last major complaint is that whiles going through the main paths is very fun, I do think optional quests that require you to backtrack makes 100% of the game just not very fun, especially since the last 20 doubloons that you use to unlock costumes are useless. So these optional quests feel like padding the game out, it is not the end of the world for me because just finding doubloons is enough to unlock all the costumes but keep this in mind if you are considering 100% this.


In conclusion, I’m very happy with this overall package that was made by people who loved the source material, but they also knew how to design a very fun 3D platformer despite its low budget showing its cracks sometimes. For a game that goes for a lower price, I can recommend this to anyone who is a fan of SpongeBob or are into 3D platformers in general

SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake pulled a Sonic Superstars for me... just nowhere near as severe.

First off, let me get the positives out of the way. Firstly, and the most obvious/apparent is that the graphic's and overall presentation are a HUGE step up from BFBB Rehydrated. The game has decent lighting, textures and the character models actually have good animations and don't look completely wooden. Another positive is the voice acting. To my knowledge, all the cast members of the show reprise their roles here and they all do a stellar job as usual and did the best with what they could do with the corny ass script they were given. The combat is incredibly simplistic but can be fun if you're fighting hoards of base level goons at a time. Sometimes I just like to shut my brain off and kick some ass don't judge me lmao.

Now for the negatives. Now obviously I don't expect the world from a licensed game let alone a SpongeBob one. But not only is the level design so simple that even calling it "simple" in the first place is a massive understatement, but like Sonic Superstars, levels go on for way too fucking long. If you've played other licensed games like Simpsons Hit and Run, you'd know how missions consist of nothing but a long lined string of fetch quests that ultimately means nothing in the game's story. Same deal here. But the absolute biggest sin of this game and what made it such a huge disappointment... is that this game is just one giant asset flip of BFBB. I started to have my suspicions about it when I was playing through Wild West Jellyfish Fields but it didn't become blatantly obvious until Karate Downtown Bikini Bottom (which is the worst fucking stage in the whole game).

I have some other criticisms here and there but I think I made my point. All in all; this game is inoffensive enough and if you have little kids who like SpongeBob or if you yourself are a fan I can say this game is harmless enough to try out. But if you're not a fan of the source material, you're just left with an incredibly basic, tedious 3D platformer. 5/10. It's okay.

A joyful experience

I have been sitting on this title for a while so I was happy to finally get around to playing it. I was very excited coming from Battle for bikini bottom rehydrated as I thought the game was a very good experience. In the end I really enjoyed my time with Cosmic Shake , finding myself smiling a lot and simply just having a great time with this game.


Platform goodness

One thing I have always enjoyed about spongebob games is its level design , it always brims with colors and joy. Each level is a blast to explore and complete, with many references from the show to be had along the way. Furthermore if you are a fan of the cartoon you will most likely enjoy this game a lot as it has many many references from the cartoon in it. In addition , the movement was fluid and fun apart from a few bugs and issues and I had. The story of cosmic shake is very simple , nothing to really write home about but that is fine spongebob games do not need insane stories. In addition, I quickly saw myself go back to each level after completing the game to 100% everything and get the platinum trophy and still the game's charm would shine through even with its grind near the end. Thank the lord there were no microtransactions in this game, EVERYTHING is only earnable through gameplay and there are alot of costumes to unlock and use which was very nice. I honestly don’t have many complaints with the game overall , it's a nice little package of good fun that will take you down memory lane.


Some complaints

While I don’t have many complaints I did have some issues that occurred during my runtime with the game. Primarily platform glitches and insta deaths which were annoying but didn’t happen often. To explain , there were a few times I would die for seemingly no reason while having full HP. It would mainly occur when I would try to go through a portal where spongebob would just glitch out and die which was odd. In addition I wish they could up the type of bosses these games have. To explain , the bosses were pretty basic in the sense that if you have played any 3D platformer you have most likely fought these types of bosses before. They never really seem to try and change up the boss formula and add some challenging bosses.


In the end

I really hope they continue with this formula because spongebob games have been in a very weird place recently. While Rehydrated was good, previous spongebob games were very hit or miss. They honestly need to just stick with Platformers and continue to innovate within its genre because I genuinely believe they could make a Fantastic platformer out of spongebob.

This one was a pleasant surprise, I enjoyed myself! ...that is, if the game didn't glitch my save file at one point and I had to start over from the beginning again. Other than that, good stuff!
Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated was an alright remake of the gamecube original and this is supposed to be the sequel we never got to it. When you view it from that lens it's hands down the best Spongebob game we've gotten. With tons of love and callbacks to the series that I know all ages of the show will appreciate. This show was a huge part of my life and playing through this game made me feel like a kid again. This was definitely a passion project made my fans of the series that respect its source material, you can tell everyone had a lot of fun voicing their lines. For a licensed childrens game in the year 2023, It's certainly up to stuff, I can imagine this being some little kids favorite game.