SpongeBob HeroPants (Xbox 360)

In 2015 the animated film The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water released where the main draw was not only that the recognizable characters from the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon would be animated in CGI when they step out of their underwater home, but they’d all be granted superpowers. It is a bit unusual the title wouldn’t emphasize this spin towards superheroics, but a game made to tie into the film decided to go for the much simpler name SpongeBob HeroPants. While the hero forms were only seen for a short time in the film, SpongeBob HeroPants could have been the chance to really see the interesting twists on the show’s characters stretch their legs in more intense action. However, not only do you not play as them too often, but SpongeBob HeroPants in general provides nothing exciting to do with the super forms or during the regular 3D platforming.

 

The story begins with SpongeBob SquarePants and his friends heading to the Krusty Krab restaurant and finding it overrun with animate and angry burgers and spatulas, but luckily for them, Bubbles the interdimensional talking dolphin appears to explain what’s going on. A magic book’s pages are able to make anything written in them come to life and SpongeBob and his friends must band together to go find whoever has the magic page so they can stop the unusual attacks. Bubbles is able to grant them their superhero forms as seen in the film, although with the caveat that they only last for a limited time and they’ll have to do much of the adventure with their own strength. With the game being 15 short levels it’s not that long a playthrough, but the game doesn’t seem interested in adapting any of the events of the film and instead gives us this new small scale adventure that is hard to place chronologically since the characters seem unfamiliar with their super forms but recognize Bubbles who they first met in the movie.

 

There are six playable characters in SpongeBob HeroPants, and while the non-playable Bubbles has a vocal stand-in, SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, Mr. Krabs, Plankton, and Squidward all have their voice actors from the show reprising their roles. While this is a nice touch at first, the voice lines in SpongeBob HeroPants are one of the first major annoyances in a game that offers very little to counterbalance such nuisances. First and foremost, the characters have way to many ways to trigger speech. If you approach a small group of enemies, your character of choice will always make sure to comment on one of them, usually having two voice line possibilities per enemy type in a game with very few unique enemies overall. Once you approach the next enemy group or lone foe, they’ll spout out another line, this reliably happening all throughout the stage. Some characters crack jokes for these while characters like SpongeBob in particular have far too much screaming for something they’ll be repeating constantly, and some of the voice lines even seem a bit inaccurate like when SpongeBob refers to the lollipop enemy as a popsicle, an error hard not to notice when he’s saying it so often.

If you choose to play with your volume down though, you have yourself a 3D action platformer with six selectable characters who are practically interchangeable. All of them start levels in their normal powerless forms and have the same set of skills such as a double jump in the air and an attack button you can just mash to endless swing at any foes. There’s no need to be more strategic with your attacks and even the upgrades you buy with the coins you collect throughout levels don’t add anything to your basic but boringly effective flailing attack. In fact, those coins buy very minimal upgrades besides the one that grants you a downward aerial slam, all the others not having the impact to justify how much of every level’s real estate is purely devoted to mostly meaningless coin collection instead of interesting platform challenges. Upgrades are tied to individual characters as well and swapping between them requires exiting out to the main menu, so at least the near lack of differentiation means you can justify sticking to a character to earn those small upgrades.

 

However, hero forms are a bit different. During play a hero meter will gradually refill on its own, and every time it is full the character you are playing as will notify you with a voice line that makes sure to explicitly lay out the fact they can now activate their superpowers but you need to be careful because it will only be for a limited time. Hearing it once is a fine tutorial, but you can go through a few uses of super mode in a level and having them read out such a long and clunky line every time adds to the aural annoyances on top of super mode unfortunately not being all that super. Your attacks aren’t really much better and flailing around is still the way to go, but you are given a single unique ability that does differ between the playable cast members. While playing as a normal character you can hurl burgers that home in on nearby enemies, able to fly absurdly far and accurately as well so long as they don’t lock onto a random piece of ground instead. In superhero mode though, your burger throw is replaced with a projectile fitting the costumed identity.

 

If you’re a character like Sandy who shifts from cartoon squirrel to a hyper realistic one called The Rodent, you can machine gun out acorns from your mouth which is at least an effective attack. SpongeBob also gets a big muscular upgrade as the Invicibubble but his advantage comes from the bubble wand on his head that can fire bubbles at foes as he is free to walk around. Other characters get shafted though, Mr. Krabs firing his claws in his robotic alter ego Sir Pinch-A-Lot and needing time for them to fly back before he can try again. Patrick the starfish as Mr. Superawesomeness can make ice cream cones fly at baddies, but it’s slow and he needs to be at a full stop to fire. Squidward as the music-themed Sour Note and the tiny Plankton who shifts from needing a robot suit to fight to a big muscular design as Plank-ton both have plain but slow projectiles as well, and since most projectile attacks are really just a way to deal with an enemy you can punch around easily but from afar, it at least doesn’t matter if your superhero form for a hero of choice isn’t good. You probably won’t have long to use these forms anyway, and their main use for actual gameplay is the fact they can jump further and run a bit faster so some optional collectibles require you to activate this mode to grab them.

 

Beating SpongeBob HeroPants is as simple as getting to the end of each obstacle course-like level, but there are magic book pages scattered around every level. Every character has the same exact line where they say Bikini Bottom is about to have one less piece of letter when a page is in sight, and while they do have other lines for when a page is seen, you can expect the litter line at least once a level. The pages aren’t required for beating the game but they are required to see the marginally different secret ending that is mildly funny at least compared to the plain normal finale, but there are two huge roadblocks to gathering them all. Some pages are sitting out in the open and you need to do a little platforming to reach them or you’ll need to activate a few switches to get to them, but more and more the game starts resorting to artificial roadblocks. Levels will feature large walls with symbols on them, each playable character having a symbol tied to them. Only the character whose symbol matches one found on a wall can break it down to grab the page on the other side, and so you’ll inevitably need to replay some levels. You can play the game with up to four human players, but since the game has six cast members you can’t cover every base. Some walls at least might allow more than one character to break it down, but this artificially adds replayability to stages as you need to just cart the character over and break a wall despite it providing no interesting gameplay challenge for the character you were forced to bring along.

The second issue with the pages is that some instead have a co-op requirement. Some of them have switches you need to stand one to make a way to the page appear, and these can require from 2 to 4 players to complete depending on the complexity. Sometimes if you use super mode and some well timed jumping you can sneak past the player requirement to get a page, but the game tries to prevent this most of the time, sometimes even putting inexplicable invisible walls in a game that actually could have used them more. In the early stages of SpongeBob HeroPants the ground you can walk on and the ground you will just fall through and take damage for doing so are hard to tell apart. The dangerous sandy ground right beside the stony platform you’re on looks like solid ground and is sometimes so close in elevation it looks like you’re meant to step down onto it, but that’s hardly the only problem with the visuals.

 

SpongeBob HeroPants has obvious texture problems on environmental objects at times, but even worse is the aesthetic stagnation. In the first five levels you’re in the characters’ undersea home of Bikini Bottom, mostly jumping around rocky and sandy areas with coral-filled aquatic backgrounds and the random piece of war imagery to emphasize the place is under attack. Once you make it to the next batch of five levels though, it seems the game wants you to think you’re in prehistoric times but can’t commit to the idea. You can still see modern metallic housing in the background of this ancient setting, the unaltered homes of SpongeBob, Patrick, and Squidward can be seen here as well rather than using their caveman designs from the show’s prehistory episodes, and even the technologically advanced Treedome is in this segment for some reason. The platforms are a little more rugged but not too noticeably different from the previous stages in style, but the final five levels do at least shift things to a visually distinct food themed approach to environmental design. However, before you’re platforming on cakes and candy, that prehistoric setting really struggles to stand out, and it wasn’t until a giant dinosaur appeared as a brief level hazard did it really click that they were, in fact, truly going for such a setting.

 

Admittedly the game did hint at that prehistoric setting before, with characters screaming about “prehistoric patties” constantly as you fought the foes in those stages. However, the enemy variety in the game is so bad that it struggles to provide anything new to fight, let alone anything worth fighting. In the early levels you see the burgers and spatulas and then in the past you see burgers and spatulas again but they look a little rougher, the game having the gall to use a cutscene to have characters praise the small shift in visual design to the burgers as something creative. Plankton has a set of robots who have gone rogue to serve as enemies as well and they just keep showing up even as the level themes change to add to the confusion more, but at least the game does phase out the satellite tower hazard in favor of small volcanoes that function the exact same. In the food level the lollipops are just reskinned spatulas, but there are a few new enemy ideas like fast rolling jawbreakers and hearts that grab onto you and explode, but almost every enemy type can be safely smacked away or, if they’re tougher like the little volcanoes, you need to smack them multiple times to put them down. The game’s two bosses are pushovers as well, the giant robot the only real fight and you can stand and whale on him since he can’t deal damage quickly enough to kill you first. The second boss though is just a chase with a Squidward-themed T-Rex who you can outrun without much issue.

 

While I will make some allowances that a child who has never played a 3D platformer might not find the action as much of a pushover as anyone with even mild game experience, the level exploration is unfortunately very weak in general. Even at its toughest you’re just jumping across slowly moving platforms or going to activate a switch to make the way onward open, a lot of navigation technically keeping you active by making you jump a lot but the act itself hollow and little serving as engaging obstructions. Coins are littered everywhere to make you run around more but this leads to a lot of empty space only filled by these coins that aren’t useful enough to invest time in collecting, and even if they were they just take time to grab rather than much skill. Some pages require you at least to maybe notice something off the beaten path, but there’s still a lot of waiting on moving platforms and perhaps even worse is the game clearly has some technical issues. When you push an object off a platform, something only possible when the game allows it, the object falls in an odd stuttering manner that make it look like a staggering downwards float instead of a drop. Platforms that flip over to try and remove you can be beat by just jumping and you’ll phase through them, although you can also potentially phase through the ground like one moment where a checkpoint dropped me through the world instead of back into action. Most of the time you’ll just run into the burger homing problem, but it’s clear that SpongeBob HeroPants was thrown together in a hurry when you do run into the more notable glitches or texture issues.

THE VERDICT: One of the most egregious cases of a licensed game slapped together with no heart or soul, SpongeBob HeroPants has nearly no creativity to be found in its level and enemy design, obnoxious and constant repetition of character voice lines, barely any substance to the fights or platforming, and superhero forms that you can barely use and aren’t much of an improvement over the regular characters when you do get time with them. To top it all off, the collectible pages needed for the secret ending require replaying levels with different characters not because they play in appreciably different ways, but because walls will only break if the right character hits them, and you can’t even bring every character into a stage since the maximum co-op player count falls short by two. In a game already lacking any ideas on how to keep the game fresh it stretches the experience out even more, SpongeBob HeroPants overall a hollow representation of not only the SpongeBob brand but 3D platformers and video games in general.

 

And so, I give SpongeBob HeroPants for Xbox 360…

An ATROCIOUS rating. A bare-faced cynical piece of slapped together digital entertainment, there was no misunderstanding of what players may enjoy here. SpongeBob HeroPants was clearly just something that needed to look competent enough to get out the door and into the homes of poor children whose parents naively bought it for them. Levels have so little to offer, a lot of jumping and smacking repeated enemies without anything really pushing you to think much about what you’re doing or making you worry about any sort of danger. The six characters do have their recognizable voices but repeat themselves more than even cartoons meant for toddlers since the triggers for saying things in this game are constantly activated, and even when you do get time in those superhero forms the game promises you find that they’re not much of a step up from their unaltered versions. If you do want to collect all of the pages you need to subject other people to the game and even then will need to replay certain already dry and lifeless levels a second time no matter how you arrange that. The game can’t even hide its technical problems well, and it almost feels wrong to suggest how to improve the game because the ways to do so are so obvious and the game must have been rushed out of the door by Activision to be close to the film’s release date. Still, the game barely attempts to iterate on anything, the game seeming to try and distract you from the empty gameplay by scattering around coins to collect even though the payoff for doing so certainly won’t improve your enjoyment of the game.

 

It’s pretty easy to brush off many movie tie-in games aimed at children as all mediocre or a little bad, and if you saw a few seconds of SpongeBob HeroPants’s gameplay you might think it’s just another member of that crowd. However, even other bad video game tie-ins do more to iterate than this game, SpongeBob HeroPants almost never really feeling like it’s gone beyond the kind of ideas you’d see in a first set of video game levels even though there are fifteen on offer. These levels can be quickly completed if you ignore all the collectables that don’t amount to much too, the level design doing little to oppose you and not rewarding exploration enough to really incentivize spending any extra time collecting things. I don’t remember too much of the film this game was made to accompany, but what there is to remember in SpongeBob HeroPants is obnoxious while the rest of the experience is unremarkable to such a degree it’s not even amusingly bad.