Game #1040: SpongeBob SquarePants featuring Nicktoons - Globs of Doom

  Spongebob keeps trying to carry Nickelodeon's weight behind him it seems!

 By the time SpongeBob SquarePants featuring Nicktoons: Globs of Doom I feel like Nick's heyday was over. Rocko's Modern Life, Rugrats, Aahh! Real Monsters, Hey! Arnold and the such had ended. Don't get me wrong, Jimmy Neutron and Invader Zim, both series featured in this game, were pretty good, but they were not the classics, y'know? So Nick decided to bank on Spongebob's undeserved(Yes, I went there) popularity to carry their final entry in the Nicktoons series, and considering the series ended, I think it didn't work... probably because Spongebob's face can't save a subpar game.

 Globs of Doom is a 3-D beat'em up, plain as simple. You play as character pairs made up of heroes and villains from Tak and the Power of Juju, Spongebob, Jimmy Neutron, Invader Zim and Danny Phantom, but you can't select the characters, instead, every couple is pre-selected for each level. The game has some veeeeeeeery weird CG models for the cutscenes, Jimmy Neutron's face looks plain wrong and... purple? On the other hand, the in-game character models look fantastic.

 The game is the cheapest, most barebones beat'em up you'll probably ever play. While the character models look great, the physics are super wonky, it feels as if your characters slid around all over the place. You get a single attack button to perform an attack combo, and by defeating enemies you can collect purple energy for your Gadget attack which makes enemies die in one hit. Most of the time. You see, all characters are, for all intents and purposes, clones... except Danny Phantom. Y'see, the animations are different, but all square attack combos are identical in damage and reach. Gadget attacks might look different but the end result is the same: The enemy gets immobilized and then you can kill it in one hit... except for Danny Phantom, who creates a green kamikaze clone of himself. Why is he the one exception nobody will ever know.

 The game is incredibly boring and lifeless, it's quite short too, but it feels so long due to how boring it is. Death is a slap in the wrist, costing you coins which you could've used to upgrade your stats. Y'know, I don't think a basic 3-D beat'em up was the worst angle you could go with for a crossover game like this one... but I would've added  more platforming challenges, made combat go by faster as not to drag on(Or by adding more depth, but it's a children's game, so it makes sense to keep it simple), and since all characters are the same... I would've added more characters, even if they didn't get voiced lines.

 All in all... not a very fun game. The crossover idea was decent, making the 'globs of doom' an orange ooze was a brilliant idea considering Nickelodeon's old orange splatter logo, but they made the game too boring, not because of its simplicity, but because of how long it takes to defeat enemies and how unnecessarily lengthy levels were.

 3.5