On “Spongebob Heropants”
Hawaiian music chirps in the background. The ocean peacefully bubbles. Gameplay pacing is serene.
This scenario is relaxing, like a laid back, undersea vacation. But then there’s a dead-in-the-water submarine; air bubbles pop from its surface. Live bombs smolder on the floor next to the recent wreckage. Sea mines are primed to explode.
You’re dark Spongebob.
The only way Spongebob can be called Heropants is if he surfaces and brings world peace. Heropants makes it clear humans are having a bit of a tiff above. Whoever thought soldiers drowning inside of a metal tube on the ocean floor was just background eye candy in a video game aimed at children is a wee bit demented.
At least the implied violence is something to see. So much of Heropants is otherwise insufferably dull. Content recycling is inexcusably massive. Stages are cut-and-paste platforms sloppily layered into one another, barely connected by the visible seams in their polygons. Optimization is so poor, Heropants often mirrors the frame rate of the movie it’s based on.
For a stretch, the presentation is harmlessly soothing. NOT being sucked into the laissez-faire rhythm before the repetition sets in is hard. Spongebob (or his compatriots) whacks at killer spatulas and burgers with a cartoon hand between moments of plodding leaping challenges. The demeanor is timid and the colors splendid — enough to capture a small child (maybe a few adults too) in its grip for a few hours.
This Spongebob crew is out to find pages of a book, mostly because Heropants needed reasoning for its existence instead of any interesting narrative. So little of this brand’s broad humor is involved; most of it here is Spongebob cycling through a dozen total lines of dialog. Turns out he holds a true disdain for spatulas, that or the music set on a one minute loop has turned him permanently irritable. It could be that the submarine crew was not torpedoed after all — they entered into a suicide pact to end the torturous monotony.
Heropants is a video game above criticism if only due to its relentless plainness. Some 300 words in, and everything Heropants offered has been covered. It isn’t much, obviously. These licensed rehashes have been made ad infinitum since an executive took a developer pitch which mashed platformers and toy brands together. Somehow, Heropants, a 3D platformer without camera controls, slipped out in 2015, one or two years after these releases found themselves victims of a self-imposed expiration date. The rest of them are snug on mobile devices.
It should be noted that when running, Spongebob doesn’t blink (would he need to underwater?). His appearance is that of a catatonic crabby patty killer. Inadvertently, his blink-less state is also a proper analogy for the existence of Heropants: Utterly expressionless.
2/5
