“SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated” is a video game from the – go figure – SpongeBob SquarePants universe. It is the re-release of the original title from 2003 and was a very entertaining jump’n’run game for us almost two years ago. A new installment was released this year with SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. I was really excited about the old part, so we played the new one shortly after it was released. Read here what I think about it.

Before writing this article, I checked whether I had already written something about the old part; I probably could have copied large parts. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; after all, you shouldn’t touch a running system. Unfortunately I didn’t write anything down at the time, so we’ll go back to the basics here:

SpongeBob (I won’t write the full title from now on) is a platformer game set in the respective universe. There is a main world in which we get and sometimes carry out more general collection tasks. From here we get into the individual sub-worlds, which are comparable to Levels, and are again divided into subsections. We’ll jump, fight and run through these levels, defeating smaller and larger enemies and advancing the story – so far, so good.

The gameplay-technical basis is the same for almost all games of this genre, the special features are then given by the franchise. In SpongeBob’s case, there are no hearts for life, but fresh tighty-whities. Patrick floats around us as a balloon and gives tips, drops an extra life when things get tricky and helps out in one or the other spot when we get stuck.

Our trusty spatula, karate hits and soap bubbles are available as attacks. With various combinations of these we defeat the mutated enemies that have entered our world – as usual also through our (Patrick’s) fault. But what can you do, we still like him.

On the way through the levels we collect jelly, which we need to unlock more costumes. These costumes are purely aesthetic in most cases, though you have to buy a specific costume for each level and wear it on your first playthrough – however, collecting the required amount of jelly during normal play was never a problem, so no grind was needed here .

Otherwise there is nothing special to say about the game. From a technical point of view it went flawlessly, we didn’t have any bugs or crashes. It ran smoothly throughout and the mechanics were very well explained and easy to understand – at the end of the day I didn’t expect too much complexity in that regard, it’s still a children’s and youth game.

Accordingly, the story isn’t really anything special or has any surprises in store. There’s a small plot twist towards the end, which I didn’t see coming either, but it’s rather marginal and doesn’t have a major impact on what you’d expect beforehand, or on the ending itself – like I said, it’s a game for children.

Personally, I wouldn’t call this game a big surprise overall – it’s essentially the same as “Rehydrated”, with slightly different explanations and a few tweaks and adjustments. Nevertheless, and that should probably represent the plot twist in this article – I was thrilled! It was one of the best games I’ve played this year (and easily in the top 5 if you count last year).

The reason for this is that I got exactly what I wanted: a fun, relaxing game with small challenges and definitely a lot of replay value for me. I only played the story on stream, but apart from that I still tried to find certain things or complete side missions. I won’t try 100%, the grind is too much for that. But it was definitely not like I threw away the controller after the story and was happy to finally be through.

I really enjoyed the two streams we played it on and afterwards. The quick rewards in the quite varied quests (not mechanical, more in terms of content) and above all the grandiose, admittedly very flat humor that still gets me, totally inspired me. That’s why this game definitely gets a recommendation from me – even if you’ve seen the whole story on my stream.

What do you think? Was it an interesting game to watch or maybe you aren’t a SpongeBob fan at all? Will you play it yourself? Join the discussion on Discord!