“SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded” Review: Crisp and Refreshing
Platform played: PC (mid-range system w/ Daulshock 4 controller)
Playtime: approx. 19 hours
Copy: Steam digital purchase (on sale)
Price/Availability: $29.99 USD. Available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Spoilers: none
Defying Expectations
Outside of The Simpsons, no cartoon has rocked the cultural zeitgeist quite like SpongeBob SquarePants. On the air since 1999, SpongeBob as a series has appealed to any possible demographic of people for a variety of different reasons. With the immense popularity of SpongeBob throughout the years, it’s a given that it would break out into other branches of media. To this day, SpongeBob has seen two feature-length films (with another on the way next year), spin-off shows currently in the works, several soundtrack releases, and of course: video games.
When you have such a lucrative property at the helm, you’re going to take every opportunity you can to cash in on that wherever possible. SpongeBob Squarepants has seen this expected “milking” process by having a litany of games released under the franchise name. With around forty dedicated games under the Spongebob IP (with several more appearing under the Nicktoons label), it should be more than obvious that Spongebob Squarepants is a major moneymaker for Nickelodeon/Viacom.
As you can predict, quantity does not immediately equate to quality. The SpongeBob license has seen far more duds in the video game scene than gems, but one game stood far above the rest: Battle for Bikini Bottom. Released almost 17 years ago, Battle for Bikini Bottom was an “above average” 3D collect-a-thon platformer at the time, yet it slowly rose out of obscurity several years ago thanks to the speedrunning community. Upon the new rise in popularity for the classic game, a vocal demand was rising from dedicated SpongeBob fans for a remake of the beloved platformer; those demands were met when publisher THQ Nordic and development studio Purple Lamp Studios announced that Battle for Bikini Bottom would not only return to modern platforms, but would also receive a major graphical facelift.
This may sound crazy to many people around my age (those who grew up playing games in the 6th console generation), but I never played Battle for Bikini Bottom. My only experience with SpongeBob games primarily comes from crummy Nintendo DS games that my parents swyped off the bargain bin to keep me entertained during long car rides. I feel that not playing the original Battle for Bikini Bottom puts me in a unique place to talk about the game, since most people I know have played the game to some extent. I feel that with this more “outsider” perspective, I can talk about this reinvigorated version of Battle for Bikini Bottom without the usual nostalgia baggage that comes with discussing remakes of older games.
So, as someone who hasn’t dived into Battle for Bikini Bottom, before, how does this game appeal to someone who: a) generally doesn’t play collect-a-thon platformers, and b) doesn’t have any nostalgia for the original game? The answer is ultimately positive, but there are some glaring cracks lingering around the bowl.
Wide as an Ocean, Deep as a Puddle
It may not come as a surprise, but Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehyraded isn’t a very complex game no matter how you try to spin it; the story is rudimentary, the gameplay is basic, yet functional, and while the levels have a lot of charm, they’re mostly indistinguishable from one another (say for one or two gimmicks unique to any particular stage). Obviously, Rehydrated (as well as the original release) isn’t a game that’s trying to tout a litany of complex mechanics or any sort of crushing challenge to present the player. As a game created with the intent to market towards a younger audience, Battle for Bikini Bottom takes a much simpler, more laid-back approach to its gameplay fundamentals. This laissez-faire approach makes Rehydraded a fun, easy time for most people, as well as a good jumping-off point for younger audiences to get into other collect-a-thon platformers, or video gaming as a whole. In addition to its general accessability, the game also has a few decent jokes up its sleeve, which is always a nice touch in kids games.
Even though Battle for Bikini Bottom goes for a simpler approach towards its primary game mechanics, that doesn’t mean that there’s some challenge hidden beyond the surface. As standard for collect-a-thon games, Battle for Bikini Bottom hides some decent challenges up its sleeve, yet never makes them mandatory to finish the game; those who are eager to take on a greater challenge can do so by attempting full completion, and those wanting to just finish the game and have an easy time with it are free to do so as well. Battle for Bikini Bottom takes the “easy to learn, hard to master” philosophy to heart by presenting an extremely low skill floor, but putting in a somewhat high kill ceiling for some of the game’s challenges found off the beaten path.
For a collect-a-thon game, Battle for Bikini Bottom doesn’t rock the boat by any means. As is standard in these types of games, Battle for Bikini Bottom implements several collectibles needed to finish/complete the game. The first — and most plentiful — of these collectibles are shiny objects, which basically acts as the game’s currency. Shiny objects are required to purchase access to challenge areas to nab other collectibles, and are also used to purchase the game’s main collectible off of Mr. Krabs.
In addition to shiny objects, Battle for Bikini Bottom allows players to collect dirty socks — which can be exchanged for the main collectible just like shiny objects — golden underwear which acts as permanent health upgrades for the player, and the coveted golden spatulas. Although there’s a whopping 100 golden spatulas available to collect in Battle for Bikini Bottom, only 75 are needed to get to the final area of the game (it’s a lot less than it sounds). The only real incentives Battle for Bikini Bottom offers for hitting 100% completion is a special cutscene, arbitrary achievements for whatever platform you’re playing on, and the pride and satisfaction that you saw everything the game had to offer. In terms of offering a “completion bonus,” Battle for Bikini Bottom certainly isn’t the worst, but it could’ve offered up a lot more for how long it takes to collect everything in the game.
Since collecting things is the primary goal of Battle for Bikini Bottom, the simplistic goals should have satisfying gameplay to make sure the experience doesn’t drag on for too long. Thankfully, Battle for Bikini Bottom offers enough in terms of gameplay variety to make things feel fresh for a little while, but they inevitably drag after a while.
To help you get through the (roughly) 8-or-so hour campaign (15+ if you’re looking for full completion), Battle for Bikini Bottom offers the player 3 playable characters to utilize throughout its several stages. No matter the stage, SpongeBob is the default character to play as, and will handle most of what the game throws at you, especially when progressively powerful upgrades are given to him. In addition to SpongeBob, both Sandy and Patrick are available to play, each of which offers some unique gameplay tweaks to seperate themselves from SpongeBob one way or another. While I rather enjoyed playing as Sandy because of her laso abilities (extended glides for easier platforming, rope-swining, and a lock-on laso attack that knocks out any basic enemy with ease), Patrick wasn’t nearly as fun to play. I personally love Patrick as a character in the SpongeBob TV show (at least in earlier seasons), but the gimmicks surrounding the character make him feel just like SpongeBob, but without any of the interesting bubble abilities, replaced with a contextual tossing mechanic for certain puzzle sequences. Besides stripping out moves such as the “bubble bowl” and “bubble missile,” Patrick helms the exact same move set as SpongeBob, which never properly distinguishes him as a unique character; he’s honeslty really boring to play as.
Turbulant Waters
Character-related issues aside, there’s something to be said about how the game generally plays, which ties into the performance and techincal details, where we begin to see some of the largest issues Battle for Bikini Bottom has to offer.
Generally, the gameplay on offer is solid, if not a little too simplistic for my liking. Understandably, Battle for Bikini Bottom is a kids game at heart, which means you’re not going to be presented with the most complex of mechanics. Even with a more watered down approach, the gameplay often showcases a lot of jank with an overall lack of polish outside of the visual presentation. Although this Rehydraded remake looks stellar in terms of graphics, the general performance is all over the place. Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehyraded isn’t a technical powerhouse; you can easily run the game with lower-end machines and still expect a generally solid, 1080p, 60 frames-per-second experience. Issues related to the performance can still be felt all over the place, even though most modern gaming computers far surpass minimum, or even recommended system requirements.
In my 19-hour experience with Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded, I experienced rare, but still confusing frame-rate dips during gameplay (generally down to 45 FPS, which is still more than playable yet still confusing), as well as moments where the characters and interactable objects got stuck in weird places, locking progression unless I fast-traveled to a mission checkpoint. Unfortunately, the latter issue concerning general jankiness was a frequent occurance; I was lucky if I didn’t have any progression-related issues happen to me in a level. Even though it’s easy to reset after being caught in level geomitry, or having an object fly to an unreachable area, these issues happened while I was in the middle of longer puzzle sequences, meaning I had to restart from where I was, setting me back minutes of progress at a time.
Although this isn’t too much of an issue, it’s still worth mentioning that in terms of sound and music, Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded is consistently solid, yet has lingering issues from the original game. The original soundtrack for Rehydraded is pretty much the same as it was before, but certain tracks have recieved a bit of an overhaul to make them sound a bit more dynamic. These soundtrack adjustments have zero effect towards me — since I never heard the original music until now — but overall, I think the music is rather superb, if not a bit repetetive to the point of being bordelrine obnoxious when sticking around a particular level for too long. The soundtrack isn’t what I really want to talk about with the sound, though (and many of you already know where I’m going with this). In the original Battle for Bikini Bottom, nearly the entire original voice cast from the SpongeBob series reprised their roles; SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, Plankton, Squidward, The Flying Dutchman, Mrs. Puff, and Barnicle Boy all have their original voice tallents on deck. Everything seems fine in the voice cast, until you hear the voices of Mermaid Man, and especially Mr. Krabs.
It’s rather obvious upon playing Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded that there were no new lines recorded for this updated version of the game. the exact same vocal tracks that appeared in the original game are in this remake, and that’s a total shame. I’ll stick by the entire original cast still sounding fantastic, even if the recordings are old, but new voice actors were brought on for Mr. Krabs and Mermain Man, possibly for contractural reasons or some other issue. I understand that Mermaid Man’s lines couldn’t be rerecorded, since his original voice actor, Ernest Borgnine, sadly passed away in 2012. Mr. Krabs’ voice actor, Clancy Brown, is still around, and is voicing the character to this day in the TV series and other media. How or why Clancy couldn’t come back to reprise his role as Mr. Krabs is beyond me, because, well, the replacement voice isn’t very good…
Technical/sound issues aside, Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehyraded is still more than playable, at least on PC. I haven’t heard of any major issues coming from either the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One versions of the game, but I’ve heard plenty of concerns surrounding the Nintendo Switch port. I’m not entirely sure if the performance issues on Switch have been handled, but I’d still take caution before diving in on that version of the game.
Time to Walk the Plank
I haven’t gone into every waking detail within Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehyraded (even if it looks like it), but one specific detail that’s worth mentioning is a new mode added to this version of the game that was previously scrapped the first go around. Throughout the single-player experience, the player will face robot versions of many major characters from the series. The player will face off against a Robot Sandy, Patrick, SpongeBob, and there’s even another robot character revealed towards the end of the game I won’t spoil. Anyway, outside of these robot enemies, there was a planned Robot Squidward that was unfortunately cut from the game. For the Rehydraded version of Battle for Bikini Bottom, Purple Lamp Studios stated they were going to bring back Robot Squidward, as well as including a previously cut multiplayer mode.
As one would expect, the multiplayer mode was probably cut for a reason. In 2020, the idea of “horde mode” multiplayer has already been exhausted from titles such as Gears of War, Call of Duty, Halo, and even Saints Row. Personally, I’m not entirely against the idea of having a more kid-friendly horde mode make its way into new games, but they have to be executed well, and bring something unique to the table. Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded’s version of a wave-based survival mode is as cookie-cutter as it gets, and is a total slog to finish. Sadly, there’s no rewards presented to the player upon completing the horde mode, making it a total waste of time; even the Robot Squidward “fight” is nothing but glorified set-decoration. Robot Squidward seemingly never attacks the player, has any attack moves, and you don’t even directly fight it; simply put, you just finish up the general waves of obnoxious enemies until a tiny cutscene plays that shows you “defeated” him; boring! If you’re still interested in this mode (even after I finished complaining about it), couch co-op is the only way you’re going to be able to play it, since only a few months after release, the online multiplayer is dead in the water.
In Conclusion
Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded is a genuinely fun experience. Despite my lack of nostalgia for the original game, I found my time with this updated version to be a rather positive one. If you can deal with the technical issues, are okay with a generally repetative gameplay loop, and you don’t mind that the multiplayer mode is total garbage, then I’d definitely recommend Rehydraded to just about anyone. The lower price for the game than your usual AAA affair helps make Battle for Bikini Bottom — Rehydraded an easier sell, so you don’t have to break the bank to have a little fun!
