Polar Opposites Double Review ("The Last of Us: Part II" and "Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated")

Let me start this double feature off by saying that I won't be touching on spoilers for The Last of Us: Part II. Initially I was going to make it a full review where I went into full story spoilers, but the fact of the matter is that when I talk about the story in-depth, it severely dampens my mood, so deep is my hatred of it. So, instead, I've elected to make the review spoiler-free and maybe do a separate spoiler talk article if I can get through it without wanting to commit murder. However, if I don't go in-depth there really isn't that much to touch on, so I decided to pair it together with another game I completed recently. So, without further ado, here's the first double-feature of the year, starting with the less good of our two topics.

Available for: Playstation 4

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

Back in 2013, The Last of Us took the gaming world by storm with stellar stealth action gameplay and a story of a quality never before achieved in a game. It was the game that I named Game of the Year at the time, and it's also the first piece of entertainment that I ever praised for having a "perfect" ending. That's why I was immediately against the idea of The Last of Us: Part II when it was announced a couple of years ago. I felt that there was no way they could possibly do anything other than make a markedly worse game. Still, I tried to hold out hope in my mind, and my attitude toward the game remained cautiously optimistic until earlier this year, when certain plot details were leaked to the public. I was unfortunately not able to avoid these leaks, so I already knew these plot details going in, but I still held out hope that, with context, these details wouldn't be as awful as they sounded. Well...it turned out context only made things worse, but I'm not going to be talking about that. Let's just get this over with.

The Last of Us: Part II takes place 5 years after the original title. After Joel's controversial decision at the end of the first game, he and Ellie have settled down in Jackson, Wyoming, in the settlement that Joel's brother, Tommy, helps run. The years have passed with little fanfare; a blessing in this cruel post-apocalyptic world. However, one day, tragedy strikes the settlement, and Ellie leaves her cozy life and many of the people she cares about behind in order to chase down the people responsible for this tragedy. That's all the details I'm going to give on the story itself, because if I get started talking about plot details my mood is going to go downhill and we'll venture into spoiler territory. But suffice it to say that the story of Part II begins on an extremely sour note and only goes downhill from there. The structuring of plot events ensures that what might otherwise have been an ok-if-divisive story is instead a terrible story. But even if the story were structured in such a way that it were serviceable, the characters in this game behave so unbelievably that it would never get past just serviceable. There are essentially no character arcs for any of the main players, and none of the new characters the game introduces have any personality at all. Hell, my favorite of the new characters is a two-timing scumbag who cheats on his visibly pregnant girlfriend and looks like every high school bully I ever had, so even that guy isn't someone I was inclined to root for. Literally the only person I was rooting for the whole time was Ellie, and...well...I can't even elaborate on that. There's just....so much wrong with this whole narrative that it really does warrant its own spoiler-filled article, but we're not done with it in this article just yet.
As I was thinking about how I wanted to tackle this issue, I wondered what I could possibly put up as a point of comparison, and I eventually settled on Grand Theft Auto V. There comes a point in GTAV where, playing as Trevor, you're forced to torture a man for information at the behest of a government agent. Meanwhile, the other two protagonists, Michael and Franklin, are out with another agent attempting to assassinate a suspected terrorist, and your job as Trevor is to wring information about this target out of your unfortunate victim, which agent 1 then relays to agent 2. Each time you get put into Trevor's shoes, you're forced to go up to a table, choose your method (waterboarding, electric clamps to the nipples, a wrench to break bones, and pliers to pull out teeth), walk up to your victim as he begs you to stop, then actively participate in a minigame where you physically perform the act of torture on him. Afterwards, the agent steps in and actually says what information he wants ("now do you wanna tell us about x?"), to which the victim responds to the effect of "what? you want to know about that? I would have told you right away if you'd said so!" This happens somewhere around 3-4 times, with the agent withholding some degree of information that he wants each time because he's a douchebag who knows the guy will talk but just wants to watch him get hurt some more. I want you to take a moment and reflect on just how much cruelty is presented in this segment of GTAV. The most comparable thing that happens in The Last of Us: Part II (without saying specifics) is that Ellie swings a pipe down on one of the people on her list with the screen fading to black on the downwards swing motion. Then it cuts to a little bit later and we're told that after the screen faded to black, Ellie used that pipe to make that person talk. Make no mistake, the on-screen violence overall in Part II is far more gruesome than anything in GTAV, but in terms of the actual on-screen cruelty, that's as close as it gets to that GTA segment. And yet, I ask you, which of these two games is more pleasant to play? Obviously I wouldn't have set this whole paragraph up if the answer weren't GTAV, but why is this the case? Well, allow me to digress for a moment. In college, my roommate and I had a tradition when we watched movies such as Gravity (with an intense theme of "let go") or Shanghai Noon (with an intense theme of "we're in the west, not the east"), where one of us would pretend to pick up a giant plank of wood and beat the other over the head with it while screaming "THEME! THEME! THEME!" The point of that tradition was that most of the bad movies we ended up watching were bad because they relied too heavily on their themes over anything else, and that same principle can be applied to the comparison I'm making between Part II and GTAV. The theme of GTAV, like just about any other Rockstar Game, is that big government is bad. It's an ever-present theme, as the game's main villain is a purple polo and khaki-wearing smiling white federal agent who consistently blackmails the protagonists into doing the government's dirty work (including the aforementioned torture). But it's a theme that's ever-present in the background (the game never hits you over the head with it), and it's a theme that's always explored in ways that make sense. Trevor jumps at the chance to put the hurt to this guy in spite of his absolute hatred of all things government because guess what? Trevor is a psycho! Yeah, you get an achievement/trophy called "it's legal" if you choose to torture using waterboarding, but outside of that, the game gets its theme across in a way that is believable given who the protagonist for the moment is. The theme of Part II is "violence begets violence," and getting that theme across takes precedence over believability or character growth. Infuriatingly, I can't discuss how the game specifically does this without going into spoilers and raising my blood pressure, so you'll have to stay tuned for the spoiler discussion. But there is one last thing to touch on. In the GTAV segment this paragraph has revolved around, the assassination target eventually gets taken out, and back at home base, agent 1 tells Trevor that his next job is to kill the guy he's been torturing, then the agent leaves, sure that the psychotic protagonist will do it. But in this moment, Trevor starts to get indignant and decides that being told to do two things in a row by this suit is where he draws the line. So instead of killing the guy, Trevor gets him in a car and drives him to the airport, setting him on his way to become an anti government torture activist. In the car ride over there, Trevor tells the guy that he's all for torture and that he does it for fun all the time, but that when it comes to using it to get information, it doesn't work. Whether he's telling the truth about his feelings or whether he just wants to stick it to the government doesn't matter, it makes sense for his character either way. A common theme I've seen in reviews of GTAV is that nobody liked the torture segment. It has made people feel uncomfortable across the board, but thankfully, Rockstar gives the player a bit of resolution at the end of it by letting the guy live to see another day and maybe take a stance against the injustices he endured. They get their point across in a way that's in line with character motivations, then they offer some resolution to the unpleasantness in a way that, again, is in line with character motivations. By the end of its runtime, The Last of Us: Part II does none of these things. The ending of this game is by far my biggest issue, but seeing as that's the case, it's the part that dampens my mood the most. I was going to include a little blurb about how unlike Part II, GTAV's torture sequence doesn't try to manipulate you into feeling bad for doing what you had no choice but to do, but at this point I've already spent far too much time discussing the awful narrative of this game, so suffice it to say that the takeaway is this: the story itself is disjointed and unsatisfying, character development is poor across the board, and the ending is a slap in the face.

In terms of gameplay, there have been some improvements in the transition from the original game to this sequel, but there have also been some changes that take away from the experience. The backbone of the game is exactly the same: the emphasis is on stealth, and if you're spotted you can fight your way out, but resources are limited, so the longer you can remain undetected, the better off you're going to be. When you aren't in stealth or combat, you'll be looting cabinets and shelves for crafting supplies and ammo, deciding what kinds of tools to spend your resources making, and solving light environmental puzzles. By far the biggest improvement to gameplay this time around is the additional crafting capabilities you have. In Part II, you can craft arrows and pistol silencers to give yourself more of an edge in stealth, as well as explosive arrows and new bomb types to help when you're spotted. You have a few more options at your disposal than you did in the first game, and I legitimately enjoyed that aspect of Part II. Another improvement is that there are fewer of the aforementioned environmental puzzles. In the original game, these puzzles were never that challenging and only served as padding, and given that Part II is already 10 hours too long, not having that level of padding is more than welcome. Another addition I'd like to touch on is the ability to go prone. Yeah, that's a basic gameplay function that first person shooters had down back in the early 2000's, but it really adds something to the stealth gameplay to be able to drop down to your stomach, roll over, and line up a bow and arrow shot from the ground. Simple, but worth noting. Finally, there's the addition of the "seraphites" faction, which isn't strictly a gameplay thing but I didn't know where else to put it. There are two human factions in this game: The WLF, who Ellie is pursuing, and the Seraphites, a religious cult that is at war with the WLF. The human enemies in the first game never had much personality, and the WLF is much the same, but with the developer's choices with the seraphites, there's a bit more meat. See, the seraphites, being a cult, have disturbing habits when it comes to people they capture: namely cutting their stomachs open and ripping their guts out while they're still alive. They wear robes, use mainly silent weapons, and if they realize that someone they can disembowel is nearby, the banter between members of the cult changes from spoken dialogue to whistling. This means that the second they get suspicious, you lose the ability to determine what they're saying. A high pitched series of three short whistles could mean anything from "do you see anything?" to "she's there, but don't let her know we've found her! David, get behind her and cut off her toes!" Without the ability to tell just how suspicious your enemies are or if they've discovered a dead body or if they have you surrounded, stealth gameplay gets a much tenser atmosphere to it, and tension is the key reason why stealth is my favorite game genre, so I can't deny that this particular design choice was fantastic.
Unfortunately, that's where the positives end. Part II has a bigger emphasis on melee combat than the first game did, and while melee in the first game was simplistic, it got the job done. In Part II, however, melee has been fleshed out in a way that I just didn't click with. See, controls in the original game were slightly clunky, but the simplicity of melee combat made up for it. Part II is even clunkier and there are more moving parts involved because of the new "dodge" feature. Rather than pressing the triangle button whenever a triangle button appears over an enemy, you now have to dodge when you see an enemy about to attack, and there's a bit of a learning curve to get the timing down. Furthermore, once you're locked into melee combat, there's basically no escape. The dodge button is mapped to the same button as sprinting, so there's a slight input delay if you want to sprint out of melee range to shoot at an enemy, and 99% of the time the enemy will have caught up to you by the time you turn back around to shoot anyway. The game seems to want you to engage in melee combat more often, and it's just not any fun to do. This can be avoided to some degree (except for the many unavoidable melee boss fights) through stealth, but unfortunately stealth gameplay has suffered as a result of some design choices as well.
For starters, the main stealth tool from the first game, "listen mode" has basically been reduced to a pointless gimmick. In the first game, you could hold down a button to visualize enemies from behind cover at great distances, allowing you to move smartly even if you couldn't yet see an enemy in the distance with your eyes. Until you got the mode fully upgraded, you couldn't hear enemies from absolutely everywhere in a given area, but you could visualize a large enough portion of the area to make plans and act accordingly. In Part II, even at fully upgraded, you can only visualize enemies from as far as an apartment room's worth of space away. 95% of the time I would see an enemy with my player eyes way before I'd be able to see them with listen mode, and even when you can visualize an enemy, the picture is so blurry that you can't tell what direction they're facing if they aren't moving. This makes it so that listen mode only has one use: if you see an enemy approaching the shelf you're hiding behind, you can use it to tell if they stopped on the other side of the shelf or if they're walking around one of its sides. Beyond that, the mode that was crucial to stealth success in the original game has been stripped down to basically no use. This is further compounded by subpar level design. I've had a hard time putting my finger on what the problem is, and unfortunately even now I'm having this issue. I think the best way to describe it would be to say that areas are simultaneously too large and too vertical. Size and verticality are both excellent ways to design stealth levels, but when put together in the specific ways that Part II does, it makes it so that you're on the verge of being spotted from a rooftop guard hundreds of yards from the building he's on top of every time you pop out from cover to move up to another bit of cover, and just when he moves another rooftop guard on a slightly smaller level walks up and starts to see you. That's an estimation of why I didn't enjoy the way levels were designed here, but all I can really say is that there was only one level that I enjoyed: the very last one. There were tight patrols of enemies that couldn't be insta-killed from afar, and it was challenging, but because the specific areas of the level were highly vertical but smaller overall, it felt like a level that was actually designed with stealth gameplay in mind.
Another negative to talk about is the fact that after a while, both the gameplay and the constant grind of looting shelves and crafting and upgrading starts to overstay its welcome. In hindsight, the same was true by the time the very last level of the original game came around, so the negative isn't necessarily that it happened...
the negative is that it started to happen, and then all progression resets. And then the game continues for another 12 or so hours. Not all of the remaining 12 hours are bad (as I already mentioned, the very last level of the game is the best part), but by the time this essentially 10-hour sidequest started, the gameplay and outside gameplay loop had already started to get old. And you'd better believe that it continued to get old from there...for many reasons.
To finish off the negatives of gameplay, I just didn't ever like the infected encounters in this sequel. There was literally not one section with infected enemies that I enjoyed, and I think it's due to a combination of the fact that all the negatives I've already addressed apply to the infected sections as well as the fact that the infected are even more aggressive than their non-infected counterparts.

So that's gameplay out of the way, but what about the technical side of things? Naughty Dog is known for the technical strength of its products, so how does The Last of Us: Part II hold up? Mostly good...but with a caveat that I'll get to. Firstly, this is a game that looks stellar. The character models, the environments, the weather effects, the animations, all of it is top shelf stuff. As you crawl through foliage, it all deforms to an insanely realistic degree. As you shove your switchblade into some enemy's throat, the blood squirting from the wound, the light leaving their eyes, and the uncanny way their mouths mime the words "I want my mommy" (ok, that's made up, but given how manipulative this game is, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two enemies did that) all come together to make you wince. When you upgrade your guns, each upgrade comes with an in-depth animation wherein you take apart a piece of the gun and actually perform the necessary work, complete with the kind of satisfying clicks and *chi-chik*s that gun enthusiasts such as myself love hearing. On the subject of sound effects, that's another thing given immense levels of care. Because the game takes place in Seattle, it's almost always raining, and the sound effects of the rain depending on where you are and what the rain hits are all flawless, and it makes you wonder how many different sound samples they must have procured. Similarly, the gunshot sounds are some of the best in recent memory. Finally, the excellent performances from the game's cast (and they are excellent, in spite of the fact that the characters aren't) are magnified by the most uncanny motion capture work done since Detroit: Become Human. So, just about everything related to presentation is a 10 out of 10, and it's absolutely astonishing how much time and effort must have gone into it!.....
I'm just not sure that it was worth the cost of Naughty Dog forcing its employees to work abusive overtime crunch hours. Like really, did we need the excessive weapon upgrade animations at the cost of Naughty Dog employees nearly being crushed by a falling pipe from a nearby construction site because the construction workers assumed nobody was in an office after 9pm and didn't take proper precautions? Did rain need to sound different when hitting a car than when hitting the ground at the cost of frequent 12-hour workdays including weekends? It seems to me that if Neil Druckmann is going to descend from on high on the wings on angels to tell a story this holier-than-thou about the value of human life, then the vehicle for his gospel shouldn't have been built on human sacrifice. Now, long time readers will know that when it comes to scoring, I neither pull punches when my biases are confirmed nor visit my wrath when my biases are denied unless a tangible impact is made on the game in either case. Normally when it comes to these stories of crunch, I just make a mention of it to remind people that there was a human cost so the reader can make an informed purchase decision, but it doesn't impact the score. But in the case of The Last of Us: Part II, as I continued playing and progressively liking the game less and less, the complete hypocrisy of Naughty Dog's message juxtaposed with the human cost of the game's stellar (and unnecessary) presentation was constantly on my mind. For more information, you can read about it in Jason Schreier's excellent article covering the crunch from all viewpoints, but for now, we're not quite done with the caveats that come with the positives. Remember when I was talking about the uncanny representation of violence when you shove your switchblade in an enemy's neck? In addition to the terrible work hours, I'm not sure that level of detail was worth Naughty Dog's animators having to watch actual videos of real human beings dying from a knife to the throat. My statement about Neil Druckmann and his holier-than-thou message just gets more relevant when you realize that this "violence is bad" game was made by overworked developers being forced to fully embrace violence. Druckmann has said that he wants the player to truly experience the feeling of shoving a switchblade into a human being's throat, and in order to achieve this disgusting, self-serving goal, he had his workers watch reference material of actual human beings (not virtual human beings in a game who therefore don't actually exist) being murdered. What's more, there haven't been specific reports of what I'm about to mention, but I'd be surprised if it weren't true. Given the realism of certain violent animations that play out, it's also highly likely that the staff working on this game had to watch videos of poor little real life doggies getting brutally murdered with axes and knives. The way in which my axe got lodged in the shoulder of a dog I had to defend myself from was simply too gruesome and too...intentional to have been conjured from thin air. I just....I want to stop talking about Druckmann's disgusting, hypocritical vision, so I'll leave it with you before we move on to the actual technical negatives: Was it worth it? If your boss told you "watch videos of people and doggies getting brutally murdered and take every single detail you can into your memory so that you can recreate it virtually, or I'll find someone who will," and he had the kind of accountability that Druckmann obviously doesn't have, would your first impression be "yeah, that's ok," or would you be inclined to contact HR?....Gah I f***ing hate this game.......but let's move on.
The first straightforwardly negative thing is a difference in opinion between me and other folks who have reviewed this game (even those who also didn't like the game): the soundtrack here just isn't memorable at all. I loved the soundtrack of the original game, and with composer Gustavo Santaolalla returning for the sequel, I'd hoped for something of equal or better quality. But the memorable cello swells and somber finger-picked guitars of the original soundtrack are replaced with reverb-heavy droning and not-as-good somber finger-picked guitar. Now, I'll concede that my love of the original soundtrack may very well have come about because I played the original game so many times. I'll admit that it's a possibility, though I don't think it's the case. So, it could be that if I played Part II a couple more times then the soundtrack might stick with me more...but it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens, so the soundtrack was completely forgettable. Another thing to touch on is an issue that only happened once. Remember how I said the best part of the game was the final level? Well, the asterisk to put on that is the fact that in the second to last area of this level, the enemy AI completely breaks (or it did for me, at least). I had been stealthing around, outsmarting enemies, and having unhampered fun for the first time in the game, and then I reached a certain point and the enemies just stopped moving. They all froze with their backs turned to me and the legitimate fun I'd been having was replaced with laughter-fueled fun as I moved from enemy to enemy with no resistance. Finally, one of the ways that the game attempts to manipulate you into feeling guilty for the violence you commit is laughably broken. See, sometimes, when you kill an enemy, a nearby living enemy will call out to them by name. This is Naughty Dog's way of saying "*GASP* This person that you killed had a name and friiiends!" The problem is that the names seem to be randomly assigned, the pool of names for the code to choose from is far too small for the amount of enemies you'll face, and the pool of lines to use alongside the names is also far too small for the amount of times enemies will see their friends die. The first time this gimmick gets used, it's admittedly effective to some degree, but the curtain falls pretty quickly. Pretty soon you realize that the dialogue always boils down to one of three or four lines. If you killed an enemy stealthily, their friend will say "Hey, you got anything? {name}?" When they discover their friend's body, they'll either say "S***! She got {name}!" or "S***! S***!" to which another enemy will respond "What's going on?" and the original enemy will elaborate "It's {name}! He's/She's f***ing dead!" And if you kill an enemy in front of their friend, the friend will simply scream out their name. This game is somewhere around 20 hours long, and when you're cycling through these same lines over and over again, what was meant to be a way to make you look in the mirror and question your actions just becomes amusing. And this is another thing that broke even further in the final level that added to the fun of it when it really shouldn't have! How did it break, you ask? Well, I only got three name lines in that level, and they were as follows:
"MATEO!!!"
Then, about 10 minutes later in a separate encounter:
"S***! She got Mateo!"
Then, another 10 or so minutes later in yet another separate encounter:
"S***! S***!"
"What's going on?"
"It's Mateo! He's f***ing dead!"
Instead of feeling guilty for having robbed these three men named Mateo of their lives (as slavers who feed runaways to the infected, but maybe I just can't sympathize with people like that because I'm not a Naughty Dog executive), I was laughing my head off and imagining some future enemy falling to the floor, ripping his shirt off, and screaming "MATEOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" with his hands flailing in the air. So, one of the technical negatives of Part II was just a matter of not being as good as in the first game, and the other two gave me a good chuckle. Not exactly damning as far as tech flaws go, but still worth noting.

Folks, I don't want you to get me wrong here: The Last of Us: Part II is not the worst game I've ever played. It's not even in the running. People who score this game as a 0 or a 1 out of 10 are just being overly emotional about it. But the fact of the matter is that in spite of being playable and having some brief bits of fun and joy, it isn't a sequel that I accept. I was against the idea of a sequel to the original game from the beginning, and I couldn't, in my wildest dreams, have imagined that the sequel we'd eventually get would be as unsatisfying and poorly constructed as this one. As a game, it's perfectly serviceable, but everything about it that matters is a failure. Despite what the critics say, the story isn't "complex." The characters don't make decisions that are "challenging." There's only one bit of praise the critics give that is accurate, but not for the better. The story here is indeed "bold," but for something to be bold, it has to come with a high possibility of failure. With that in mind, yes, the story and character decisions of The Last of Us: Part II are bold, but they aren't a success. The gameplay is functional but not enjoyable most of the time, and by the halfway point it overstays its welcome. Technically, the only things wrong with Part II aren't all that bad and most of it is going to set the standard of quality for the next generation of gaming. But in that regard, I can't help but mentally form a parallel between Ellie's grueling work in the plot of the game and the crunched developers' grueling work to make it. Both went through and sacrificed so much for their goals, but in the end, was it really worth it? My answer to that question is a resounding "no." The Last of Us: Part II is a borderline toxic, manipulative experience brought about by equally toxic, manipulative business practices, and its redeeming qualities are few and far between. While far from the worst game I've ever played, I simply can't remember the last time I loathed an experience as much as this. If you're a fan of the original game and haven't yet had the chance to play, as much as it may hurt to do so, I'd like to propose that you save your money for a game that might respect you and the universe you love a bit more. And Naughty Dog (except for the hard-working developers)?
You should be ashamed.

Let us review:
Awful story and ending - 1.0
Terribly-written characters with no development - 1.0
Gameplay detriments - 1.0
10 hour sidequest (more details in a future spoiler talk) - 1.0
Tech problems + hypocrisy of the message with business practices - 0.5

The final score for The Last of Us: Part II is...




5.5/10 - Barely Above Average
Shame on you, Naughty Dog, shame on you.

Now I just hope that I can muster up the resolve to do that spoiler talk article, but for now, let's transition to a game that's actually good.

Available for: Playstation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows

Reviewed for: Playstation 4

My history with Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom is the same as just about anyone who has history with it. The game originally came out when I was a kid, and as a kid, I was never able to finish it (I guess I unknowingly had a future as a gamespot writer). But I remember enjoying it for the same reason just about anyone else enjoyed it: it was a classic platforming adventure starring everybody's favorite absorbent, yellow, and porous hero! But because it was an old TV-licensed game, I never in my wildest dreams would have imagined that we'd one day see a remake of it. Enter Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated, a 1-to-1 remake of the original Spongebob adventure in the Unreal Engine. In this year's biggest surprise of a remake, some things from the original game hold up, others don't. So puff out your chest, say "tax exemption," acquire a taste for freeform jazz, and let me talk to you about Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated.

The story of Rehydrated is simple: One day, series antagonist Plankton puts together a robot-creating machine so that he might be able to use them to either steal the krabby patty formula or take over Bikini Bottom (take your pick). However, after starting up the machine and sending robots out into the world, he realizes that he forgot to set one of the switches from "Don't Obey" to "Obey," so the robots turn on him and start running amok. From there, it's up to Spongebob, Patrick, and Sandy to venture across the various areas of Bikini Bottom collecting golden spatulas so they can get to the chum bucket and stop the robot menace...already it's a more compelling and more satisfying story than the one presented in The Last of Us: Part II, but I digress. This being a low effort licensed game from the early 2000's, the story basically gets the job done and allows for as many recognizable faces to appear as possible. So while it isn't exactly realistic that Plankton's security system for the chum bucket requires 75 golden spatulas to enter the robot area, the game doesn't ask you to take it seriously and it's good enough reason to kickstart the primary gameplay loop and I promise this is the last time I make even vague comparisons to Part II. As I've already stated, the game makes an effort to put as many familiar faces into the plot as possible, so you can expect to hear from Mrs. Puff, Larry the Lobster, the Flying Dutchman, etc. The only problem with this is that developer Purple Lamp Studios simply took the recorded voice lines from the original game, they didn't re-record anything. At the time of the original game, the original developers evidently didn't have the money to get Clancy Brown or Ernest Borgnine in the studio, and because Purple Lamp just took the lines they did get, Mr. Krabs and Mermaid Man sound unfathomably awful. Yeah, this was an issue with the original game (not to mention Ernest Borgnine isn't with us anymore), but I feel like some effort could have been expended to make the voices of these two characters not as bad. Other than that, it's a fun story with fun characters that we all know and love, and that's really all there is to say on the story front.

On the gameplay front, this is a classic platforming collect-a-thon, so you probably know what to expect. Each level has a main objective that you'll earn a golden spatula for completing as well as: several golden spatulas that you'll get for completing side objectives, many pairs of Patrick's missing socks that can be exchanged for golden spatulas, and "pretty objects" that can be sold to Mr. Krabs for golden spatulas. In order to progress to a new level, you need to obtain a certain amount of golden spatulas, so you can choose to get them by completing objectives or by collecting socks/pretty objects. It's basic collect-a-thon stuff the likes of which every licensed game of the early 2000's was doing. None of it is particularly challenging (in spite of what gamespot would tell you), but if you like collect-a-thon gameplay then gameplay in Rehydrated is a good, straightforwardly fun time that you'll probably enjoy! Before I move on to where the game starts to falter, let me go into a bit of detail about each of the playable characters. Spongebob is obviously the default, and he has the broadest range of abilities. As Spongebob, you can blast up into the air to hit things above you, perform a ground pound to hit things below you, swing your bubble wand around to attack enemies, roll a bubble like a bowling ball to activate spinning platforms, and eventually send out a guided missile bubble to hit enemies or switches in the distance. Patrick probably would've served as more of a tank if the original developers had more time and money. As Patrick, you can do a belly flop that covers a wide radius and stuns the robots it doesn't kill, and pick up various types of items that can be used for Patrick-specific puzzles. Sandy serves as the game's most platforming-centric character. She uses karate moves to deal with enemies up close, a lasso to deal with them from afar, and she glides across much larger areas than Spongebob or Patrick by using a combination of a helicopter-style lasso and Texas-shaped grapple points. None of these characters really feel that different to play outside of their unique abilities, but that's not a big deal.

Initially this was going to be a part of the gameplay paragraph, but as I was writing, I realized it was probably more relevant to put it as a part of the technical paragraph. See, the devs really didn't change much in this remake, so the game controls exactly like a platformer from the early 2000's that didn't have Nintendo or Sony's budgets. In 2020, that level of jank shows, and it's odd to me that Purple Lamp made no improvements whatsoever to how the game controls or feels. The most concise way I can think to describe it is to reiterate that gameplay isn't challenging...and follow it up by saying that every death you experience feels cheap. You aren't likely to die in combat, rather, you'll probably end up dying as a result of platforming mishaps. While most of the platforming challenges are pretty straightforward, there are times where there won't really be a way to tell if you're going to land on a platform or just to the left or right of it, and when it turns out the latter answer was correct, it can feel a little frustrating (a feeling only worsened by the fact that death brings up a small loading screen each time before throwing you back into the action). In addition to this particular bit of unwelcome classic platforming issues, there's also plenty of unwelcome classic game design. For instance, Spongebob and Patrick canonically can't swim, and the devs of the original game chose to manifest this bit of Spongebob lore in "goo" that instantly kills you if you touch it. In certain levels like Goo Lagoon, this mechanic is a necessary bit of level design that makes sense even if instant death via liquid is still an outdated concept. When applied to teeny tiny puddles of goo the look like decorative features of a level, though? It's a bit less acceptable. To give another example, this is a game absolutely teeming with invisible walls. I remember trying to get to a collectible on top of the Bikini Bottom police station by climbing up a couple of rocks at the side of the station. That would seem to be the most reasonable way to get there, right? Unfortunately, if you try to get to this collectible the way that being a gamer for years would likely teach you to, you'll be met with an invisible wall that keeps you from jumping on the rooftop that is clearly within jumping range. What's more, the invisible walls don't seem consistent. One rock had an invisible wall on it at one point, then it didn't when I jumped on it from a different angle, but then it was back and I was temporarily trapped. I mean, the invisible walls aren't even used in the ways that would seem natural! Take the hub area, the part of Bikini Bottom where Spongebob, Squidward, and Patrick live. The map stretches off into the various levels from there, and in order to actually reach these levels, you have to walk up to a traffic gate and press a button. The problem is that these traffic gates are surrounded by seemingly open spaces that look like they can be walked around in. Once you get past the little invisible line, though, you get carried away by the realistic hand from the show, face a small loading screen, and are then placed right before the invisible line as if nothing had happened. Now, it seems to me that the place to put invisible walls would be on those invisible lines, so as to not have this unnecessary hassle. It's tempting to argue that it's just because this is a 1-to-1 remake, but many of the invisible walls here were added by Purple Lamp, so it boggles the mind why they couldn't have made this incredibly easy design call, especially given that they removed the large dotted lines that served as boundary markers in the original game.
Unfortunately, the technical iffiness doesn't end with outdated design choices. There's also plenty of issues that come from a simple lack of testing. For starters, the texture pop-in in this game is simply horrendous. Every single time you enter any area, the textures will all be blurry and take a second to load in. This happens every time without fail, whether you're entering the area organically or fast traveling in. Now, once the area has loaded, the textures behave, but that's shallow praise. Beyond that, the audio in this game is terribly mixed. Even with the sound effects turned down to like 4, certain sound effects were ear-splittingly loud compared to the rest of the sounds. This was most notable when loading into the sand castle portion of Goo Lagoon, but little bits of poorly-mixed sound were present all throughout the game. Finally, I had a golden spatula that was bugged. After touching a spatula in the dream level, it showed up as being acquired in the list of spatulas in that level, but the spatula itself was still there and didn't show up in my total spatula count. Furthermore, I've heard reports of other spatulas being bugged as well.

How exactly does one score a remake that is as 1-to-1 as Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated is? This was the question I pondered as I wrote the previous couple of paragraphs, and eventually I settled on judging everything that was the responsibility of Purple Lamp. Not getting Clancy Brown to play Mr. Krabs, while likely more doable now than in the early 2000's, wasn't Purple Lamp's responsibility to do. Just about every technical issue, however? That was their responsibility. Even a 1-on-1 remake needs to have its kinks ironed out, or at the very least, it shouldn't introduce brand new ones to the mix. Because there's so little that can actually be blamed on Purple Lamp here, I've decided to up the point deduction scale to 2. So, whereas in a normal game I can only take off a maximum of 1 point for any negative, in this case a deduction of 2 points has the same implication as a 1 on the normal scale, and a 1 has the same implication as a 0.5. With that in mind, in spite of being an absolute mess, Rehydrated is a lovely trip down nostalgia lane with characters and locations we all know and love, and much like Maneater, it's just a good, fun time....because that's what games are supposed to be...fun...not unpleasant.

Let us review:
Unfixed design flaws - 1.0
New technical flaws - 1.7

The final score for Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated is...



7.3/10 - Good
Decent work, Purple Lamp, decent work