2/5 ★ – Anteater's review of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom - Rehydrated.

Kind of a disappointing remake. It's faithful to a fault at times (a good 25% of the enemy types are straight up annoying to deal with which makes some encounters bizarre difficulty spikes, the endless repeated quips quickly get grating, a few challenges are obtuse and imprecise), and is a lot buggier compared to the original (floating tikis, collission, Sandy's hover starting if you hold jump for more than .5 seconds and literally stopping all momentum on a slide ). However, from a visual standpoint, I think it looks gorgeous, the new models, animations, and (most) of the locales are genuinely impressive. One of the cutscenes genuinely looked cinematic quality. HOWEVER, do NOT touch this on Switch. I played most of it on handheld and it looked all well and good, had some pretty bad frame drops in spots, pretty frequent/close pop-in, bad shadows, and long load times, but it was 100% playable and enjoyable. Docked is an absolute nightmare. Shit looked genuinely worse than the original, with textures that would never load in (I had a floor texture that didn't load, which covered a floor hazard that killed me), a constant sub 30 FPS, even worse pop-in (I missed multiple collectibles simply because they did not load in on platforms so I assumed I already got it), nonexistent shadows, and FREQUENT input delay/eating. At times I would sit there and mash jump and it would just do nothing. I would try to rotate camera left and it would respond 2 seconds later, or just keep spinning until I hit another direction. Genuinely inexcusable. Since it's a short game (and easy to 100%), I went ahead and finished it on Switch. And I know a lot of Switch players may say "First bad port?" but like, yeah. If i didn't get this for free I probably would have returned it ASAP. Get it on any other platform and enjoy a functional, much prettier experience.