Jimmy Neutron was one of the few Nicktoons I consistently watched as a kid, and I remember having an okay time with this when I played it several years ago. Although I still enjoy the show, I cannot say the same thing about the game now.

This probably won't be too surprising, but it's a pretty generic licensed kid's game. I'll give credit where it's due and say that the visuals and music aren't bad; they certainly look and feel like the real show. Some of the writing is even lifted straight from the episode this game was inspired by. The actual gameplay is super boring, though. All the game really amounts to is slowly running around collecting invention parts and capturing the same enemies over and over and over.

Although collecting gizmo pieces and inventing new items sounds cool, most of them really only amount to being keys to unlocking parts of the levels and don't have much utility otherwise. You can invent optional items, but most of them range from completely useless to actively detrimental to playing the game. There's a huge amount of missed potential here; removing most of these gadgets would have no effect on the rest of the game.

The combat (if you can even call it that) is just as bland. It's as if the developers thought, "What if we made Luigi's Mansion, but made it suck?" You fight enemies by blasting them with a ray and then sucking them up with a vacuum. You even suck them up by moving the control stick in the opposite direction from where they are going; I wasn't kidding with the Luigi's Mansion comparison. You fight the same enemies in every single level, and I swear you cannot fight some of them without taking damage. There is little variety in the combat, and because that's all the game really has in terms of actual gameplay, I got bored really quickly.

The campaign is super short, but it somehow feels way longer. Every level is ridiculously long, and the general flow of levels is very repetitive. The few boss fights are annoying, and the game often resorts to simply telling the player the solutions to puzzles and fights instead of subtly guiding them to a solution. You are also not able to replay levels once you complete them without beginning an entirely new campaign (not that you'd want to go back to these levels). The only thing saving this game from being outright bad is its aforementioned aesthetics; they're genuinely decent and faithful to the show. Without that, this would be a nothingburger of a game. I can't really recommend this to anybody, except the nine avid Jimmy Neutron fans on the planet.

I had set the bar for this game pretty low, considering it's a game based off an episode of a TV show, but wow, maybe I should've set the bar lower. This game is basically discount Luigi's Mansion without any of the good parts of Luigi's Mansion. The game feels very frontloaded, as the latter half of the game barely has any levels at all and feels like "do one stage, then the resident bad boss fight."

Speaking of the boss fights, all of them are pretty awful, but I'd say the Frozen Lake Boss is the worst of the bunch. At least with the Playground Boss and Rollercoaster Boss, they're easy once you figure out their gimmicks. but with the Frozen Lake, you're fighting against ice physics. I also learned that if you die, you have to do the fight over again. Very much a 2004 thing, but not any less annoying to deal with ice physics. The final boss is just a combo of the previous three bosses and their skills, but with the same ice physics in the Frozen Lake Boss.

Most of the gizmos you can make are gimmick items that serve no use while others are more usable, like the Speed Sneakers for general speed and the Sticky Sneakers to handle those pesky ice physics. The Health Recharge is useful too when you need health and you're waiting for health pickups to respawn. Most of the inventions and super inventions felt like they barely had time in the sun beyond the VDR and the Sheenograph, as they're both mandatory for capturing the Twonkies Luigi's Mansion vacuum style. Goddard also felt very underused as well, only being used in a couple of levels and totally ditched after that for the rest of the game.

The only level I liked a bit is actually the one that gatekept me from beating it as a kid, the Retroland level, where you need to play the arcade games to get tokens to reach the rollercoaster, which goes directly to a boss fight after a cutscene level. The arcade games were a fun distraction, but I know why I never beat this game as a kid, and it's that you're required to get the high score on all the games to progress. It's not hard, but it may require a bit of patience, something child me didn't have much of.

All in all, it's a game based on a TV show, and these kinds of things generally aren't very good to begin with. This game is one example of that.