SpongeBob SquarePants: Plankton’s Robotic Revenge is a terrible licensed action, somewhat platformer.
I say somewhat as the games idea of platforming seems to be occasionally jump across a log blocking your path, up onto a higher ledge in front of you or onto slow moving platforms to cross a giant gap. Its a poor attempt at best and only in place to break up the bad action sequences that are littered throughout each of the games stages. The three main sections all end with a poorly designed boss battle and their are terrible design decisions throughout that make for anything but a fun experience.
I’d go over the platforming in more detail than the above summary but I’m afraid that’s it. The only other aspects to the game aside from combat are to stomp on a button to open the door in front of you and the endless falling stages that occur at the end of some levels in which you can collect parts (the games equivalent of coins) which are used to upgrade and unlock the various weapons on offer for your choice of character to use. These unlocks and upgrades don’t carry over between characters so the chances are the whichever character you use on the first stage is the same you’ll use throughout. What’s the point in using an underpowered character when anthers got an arsenal of weaponry fully upgraded and the games attempt to increase difficulty in later stages is merely to throw more and more enemies at you in a poor attempt to overwhelm the player. The only real difference between the characters is the animation that plays out for their melee attacks but when combat can be easily beaten by running and jumping in a circle while constant pressing the fire button as the game locks onto targets automatically for you.
As alluded above, your combat options are to either use melee attacks or one of the various weapons which you can unlock. The problem with the many firearms are that the game offers no way to aim and instead chooses to automatically lock onto targets for you. There’s no way to lock into and focus on a particular enemy, you cannot easily switch between multiple targets and there’s a noticeable and rather annoying delay from the moment you fire in an enemies direction and to the game locking on and targeting the foe. Also the smallest grunt enemies cannot be targeted with any form of weaponry (but still can be killed with it) which is constantly annoying.
Speaking of annoying the music repeats on loop for a given stage and a frantic combat music triggers and plays occasionally in the more intense combat situations. Its not that the music is bad just that it isn’t catchy or good enough to justify playing on loop like the classics of old. Also the characters talk constantly and with only a handful of dialogue lines you can imagine how annoying their constant blurting out of phrases can get. If you think I’m exaggerating, I heard the same line three times within one encounter and that was with a few others repeated as well. If I do the math, approximately 7 lines were spoken of which there were 3 phrases.
Other issues with the game include not having any form of camera control and a funny issue with inconsistency regarding falling off the stage and world. The issue being that the majority of the time any attempt to jump off the stage results in colliding with an invisible wall and the only areas in which you can fall to your death are when the game specifically asks you to jump across a gap. Its amusing if only for the fact that I’d like to believe that the developer was having trouble making the player die when they fell off the stage randomly consistently and chose to instead make it impossible rather than solve the problem.
I did not expect a great or even good experience going into my time with this game. What I didn’t expect to find was a game so poor as this in terms of its overall design and quality. If anything I’m glad that I didn’t pay actually money for this and that I’ll be able to sell it on for a profit; if your considering purchasing the game and reading my review, unless your going for a full collection of Wii U games avoid at all costs. And if you are going for a full collection, play only to verify that it works then move onto a better game as that certainly won’t be hard to find.