SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated (Xbox One)

Licensed games are often doomed to be locked to whatever consoles they are released for. Rarely will they get new ports or remakes due to the trouble in renegotiating the brand deal and general lack of interest due to the games predominantly being rather low in quality, and even now when the games can be released in digital form to ensure greater longevity, expiring licenses lead to them being removed from storefronts anyway. Most people probably don’t miss these subpar adaptations of movies and T.V. shows, but every now and then a game captures the attention of players, and SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is fondly remembered by many who played the original version back in 2003. A 3D platforming collectathon, it seemed to have a bit more love put into it than your usual tie-in game, and so many gamers hold a nostalgic spot for it in their heart that a surprisingly lively speedrun scene emerged around it. This unexpected popularity made Battle for Bikini Bottom one of the rare licensed games to be remade, and considering the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise was still huge even 2020, it probably wasn’t too hard to justify for the license holders either.

For the most part, SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is the original game with a visual upgrade and some small instances of tidying up things like checkpoint placement and the addition of a rather boring multiplayer mode where you smack a bunch of robots away in some fairly bland combat. However, the main adventure is what most players will be coming to the remake for, and the story kicks off when the undersea city of Bikini Bottom suddenly finds itself terrorized by an army of evil robots. Accidentally unleashed by series villain Plankton when he forgot to set them to serve him and assist in his own plans for world domination, the robots begin to terrorize the fish people of the city. SpongeBob, believing his wish to see robots in real life caused the problem, sets off to help take them down and find out the source of the invasion, but along the journey the absorbent yellow sponge will receive assistance from his dim-witted starfish friend Patrick and the Texan squirrel in a diving suit Sandy, rounding out the total playable characters in the main adventure to a set of three. You’ll spend most of your time as SpongeBob unsurprisingly, but depending on the level, you might do small portions as either Patrick or Sandy where their unique attack types shift up the action for a little bit.

Since this is a 3D platformer, movement options are definitely important, and the double jump universal to the three playable characters often gets the job done where it’s meant to. However, while you’re navigating levels, it can sometimes be unclear whether or not a rock outcropping or some other part of the level geometry will allow you to stand on it, leading to you hitting invisible barriers or being pulled back to the main part of the level after making a mistake in judgment. This mostly just applies to areas that are already part of barrier walls like large rock outcroppings, but it does make it strange when some of these contain goodies and your jumping onto them is encouraged. As for your other abilities, SpongeBob has a twirl of the bubble wand to hurt enemies, Sandy can lasso them easily from afar, Patrick can do a belly rush, and SpongeBob and Patrick can both do downwards aerial slams to deal damage. SpongeBob will get some unlockable abilities like the bowling bubble and the cruise missile bubble he can guide to his target, but these are mostly for activating switches or harming the few enemies you can’t really safely approach like the shielded robots. Most of the robots you encounter are fairly straightforward fights where a bit of rapid attacking will do the job. They mostly seem to be there as hazards to bother you while you do level objectives, regular robots rushing you, tartar sauce robots firing globs of it from afar to pester you during your jumps, and weather robots trying to zap you with chasing storm clouds, but the reason the horde multiplayer mode and the few main game instances of objectives focused on fighting robots feel bland is because they aren’t really well built combatants when they’re being focused on as the sole challenge.

Most of the game isn’t about bashing robots though, as SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated’s main objective is to collect as many Golden Spatulas as you can to unlock new levels and make your way to the final battle. Golden Spatulas are scattered all around the game world, these often serving as the reward for completing some sort of mission or challenge. A fair amount of these are just waiting for you once you’ve made your way through a portion of one of the worlds, basically marking the exit point before you move onto the next subsection, and a few others are prizes for doing rather plain things like the unexciting bungee jump challenges where you easily go down and grab them. Thankfully though, there are some better conceived challenges to be found as well. There are slide portions in quite a few levels where you barrel downhill like you were sledding, Sand Mountain actually being almost exclusively built around them. These require careful movement to avoid going off the edges, course knowledge to get all the extra goodies scattered around these ramps, and quick reflexes if you want to beat the optional timer objectives that manage to make these sometimes challenging. Sometimes you’ll be asked to solve a small puzzle or go through a platforming gauntlet, and these rise and fall in quality based on what the game expects from you. It’s clear at times this is meant to appeal to kids with Golden Spatulas that barely test your skills, but then you have more intricate challenges like the Mermalair’s ball challenge where you need to activate mechanisms at the right time or the tiki challenge in the Kelp Forest where you need activate three switches without dropping into the water as you jump around small platforms while under enemy attack.

There are a few other collectibles in Battle for Bikini Bottom to look out for as well. Patrick has lost a bunch of socks across the game’s many worlds and turning in batches of ten to him will earn you Golden Spatulas, and floating goodies called Shiny Objects are used as currency to either open new parts of a level or buy Golden Spatulas from SpongeBob’s boss Mr. Krabs. Tikis are often located around levels that serve as small diversions where breaking them can earn you Shiny Objects or using them properly will let you reach bonus goodies, and they come in different varieties too like the explosive kinds or ones that disappear if you don’t approach them carefully. They’re pretty much one of the few areas SpongeBob’s upwards headbutt comes into play, but the tikis are clearly there to spice up areas of the level that might otherwise feel too empty or plain.

The worlds are a mixed bag, some being rather basic, others being incredibly creative, and some that feel like they were put in because the original release’s developers had no good ideas for the area. Kelp Forest is an unexciting world with slow navigation and some of the harder challenges since it is found late in the game, but the dream level is also one of the final levels and its creative display of the various dreams of different characters manages to both be an enjoyable challenge while impressing with imaginative visuals. Downtown Bikini Bottom is lacking in interesting objectives, but Goo Lagoon’s underwater beach feels like a decent middle ground with its mix of platforming and exploration focused objectives. Regardless of what you think of the levels design-wise though, the game is rife with fun references for fans of the cartoon. Visiting a location like Rock Bottom is a good way of making a level appealing conceptually while having the deep sea trench city stand out from the other stages, and speaking with familiar characters like Mrs. Puff, Larry the Lobster, and even Bubble Buddy with their original voice acting is a treat. Mr. Krabs and the aquatic superhero Mermaidman have some incredibly poor stand-in voice actors though, and with Mermaidman’s elderly sidekick Barnacleboy putting in perhaps the best performance of the cast, it’s a shame he’s playing off a poorly done impression. Barnacleboy probably wouldn’t stand out as the best if not for the poor writing on other characters, most humor being fairly uncreative and characters are often boiled down to their most basic traits. Sandy will just keep making Texas oriented similes, Patrick is a complete idiot when he speaks, Plankton only talks about villainy, and SpongeBob himself seems a bit too hyper and random. You still get plenty of cute references to specific episodes, but very little of the original writing done for the game impresses.

Boss fights come in a few different forms. Three of them serve as important milestones in the story, SpongeBob and his friends having to go up against giant robotic versions of themselves. These are the boss battles at their best, enormous multi-phase machines putting twists on the character’s usual traits and requiring you to shift up your tactics each time they whip out a new attack type. The bosses found within the levels themselves aren’t quite as complex, the Flying Dutchman battle being a fairly basic dodging game until you can lasso the ghost’s tail and the game inventing a Mermaidman villain named Prawn instead of drawing on a recognizable one only to have his fight be basic dodging before you hurl a bubble bowling ball at him during his openings. They are better than smacking around a bunch of basic robots, but the robot bosses are definitely the more enjoyable fights since they keep changing and require more than just easy dodging to overcome. The lack of multifaceted goals in general is probably one thing holding this game back, as many Golden Spatulas feel like they’re just about going somewhere or collecting a few random things laying around a level. When the game is trying to get you more involved like trying to outrace the rising goo in the giant sandcastle then it feels like you’re actively being engaged, but a lot of the adventure feels like you’re just doing something simple you’ve come across or dealing with something whose many moving parts don’t come together perfectly.

THE VERDICT: When looking through SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, the main thing that stands out is not a whole lot of it seems exceptional. It has plenty of fun references to the show and will likely have a heavy nostalgic appeal for many players, but what stands out most about this 3D collectathon is that not much actually stands out about it. It has some fun level concepts like entering the dreams of the core cast, the robot bosses are interestingly designed, and there are a few challenging platforming segments, but most of the experience isn’t asking much of you. Many goals are about finding objects laying out in the open or getting to a point you’d need to reach to continue through the level anyway, so a lack of creative level design leaves this a solid but fairly average platformer rather than one that will struggle to win over people that aren’t fans of the original game or the brand it’s tied to.

And so, I give SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. I really wanted to rate this game higher. I love the older seasons of SpongeBob and I played the original game a bit back as a kid. The story of this remake is inspiring and I would love to see other old licensed games gets a similar treatment. And yet, I find it to be a middle of the road experience, and with the disconnect between fans and critics of this game already making it seems like it was critically disliked but adored by regular gamers, it feels weird to be standing at the center and unable to truly lean strongly towards either side. It is a bright, colorful, cartoon adventure that captures the world of SpongeBob well and has plenty of nifty surface level shout-outs to tickle you as you explore Bikini Bottom, but the actual joke-telling feels more in line with the worse seasons of the show rather than the classics episodes this game is based on. Boss fights with recognizable characters like The Flying Dutchman and the King Jellyfish are too basic to really get involved in, and a general sense of being too simple pervades a lot of the Golden Spatula objectives. Every now and again the game whips out a strong concept to test you with, and the game doesn’t require you to do every mission so you can skip the weaker ones, but so many are easily grabbed along the way that it feels like it can’t quite provide the satisfaction of getting a spatula every time you grab one. There’s not many outright failures save for things like the multiplayer mode, but unless you’re fairly young, much of the game can be breezed through without very many gripping challenges standing in your path.

SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated will sooner be found rubbing shoulders with games like Scaler and Brave: The Search for Spirit Dancer rather than 3D platforming classics like Banjo-Kazooie and Super Mario Odyssey. The SpongeBob brand helps to make it more memorable than the original release’s contemporaries and it’s still a solid collectathon that could provide a good bit of fun for a fan of the cartoon, but without nostalgia or the brand it wouldn’t be mechanically up to snuff to really stand out then or now. If you think you’ll like the game you probably will and if you think you won’t then you’ll probably be proven right, with only a few moments really tipping it either direction naturally while most of the experience is merely competent. Still, considering how often licensed games flounder futilely to provide an enjoyable experience for fans of the brand or people just looking for a generally decent game, this unexpected remake at least deserves some kudos for putting together something that isn’t that bad.