Nickelodeon’s Spongebob has gone to the big screen and is taking over your Playstation. The annoying yellow sponge and his funny looking friends have a mission… however, even after many hours of playing I am still quite unsure as to what the mission actually is… This is probably because Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie (SSTM) is a pipedream of a game, confusion at every corner, and a colour scheme to put a smile on an opium smoker’s face.

The game begins at Mr Squarepants’ restaurant, where a very confused crab (That’s Mr Krabs) informs Bob of a cheese dish that went sour. Before you know it all hell has broken loose, police cars patrol the sea bed and helicopters search the sky.
Bob shows up and starts bashing random jellyfish and collecting odd shaped items… confused? You’ve seen nothing yet.

Any form of tutorial is bypassed as the controls are very simple, before you know it your collecting things and squishing enemies with ease. After a few minutes of jellyfish-bashing and item collecting, the level ends, switching to a bar scene. As the paper thin story unfolds, you see that Bob and his deformed-male reproductive-part-look-a-like friend, Patrick, have been out on the beer.

Still steaming from the night before, Bob is whisked away by bouncers and Patrick throws a wobbler, smashing up the place and beating up bouncers whilst searching for his friend. May I just point out that this game makes no sense whatsoever? Fans of the movie and TV show may be able to decode it better than I can, but to me this game is dim-witted and confusing. To top it off, an evil ginger character that goes by the name of King Neptune has frozen Mr Krabs until Squarepants and Pinkie can defeat whatever is causing everyone to wear buckets on their heads and go a bit crazy. By this point my head was aching from trying to figure out what the hell is going on.

Anyway, there are a few things that make more sense, some of which are the ability to add special moves to your characters. Bob and Patrick have their own skills, upgradeable via pickups located around the psychedelic levels, each increment adding more power or new feature to the actions. These new powers open the game up a bit and make for a slightly more interesting game, only slightly though.

The gameplay reminds me of Crash Bandicoot, where boxes can be broken with spinning moves and items collected. Every once in a while there is a decent platform element added to the levels, but in the long run becomes quite tiresome. Luckily there are some pretty interesting mini games from time to time, one of which is a bathtub ride around a bizarre canyon, the story still makes no sense but at least it’s a fun ride. After playing a few of these mini race-style games I began to wonder whether SSTM would have made a better racing game that follows along the lines of Mario Kart.

Thankfully there is a save game system that lets the player choose which level they wish to play, although most the levels are not that re-playable it’s still nice to have the option to go to the ones that aren’t quite as linear. SSTM has cut scenes that break up each level, sadly these cut scenes are pants (pardon the pun). Rather than having interesting animation, the game developers opted for dull still images with a voice over. The voiceovers are of a surprisingly good quality, it’s just a shame about the cut scenes didn’t match.

Pro Logic is a standard in most PS2 games; the best feature in SSTM is definitely its use of surround sound. Helicopters pan round the speakers, rocks tumble behind you, and if you close your eyes you could be in a James Bond movie. In-game graphics are fairly good (nothing to shout about) with little slow down, and the music is well varied, switching from Jazz to Rock, to TV style cheesy cartoon music (ala Spongebob) depending on the scenario.

Spongebob neither sinks to the bottom of the sea bed, nor rises to the top. Instead he is somewhere between, swimming with the crowd of movie to game cash-ins. Kids will enjoy it, adults will hate it, and no one will remember it.