3.5/5 ★ – Iversset's review of The Spongebob Squarepants Movie.

My nemesis. I have owned this game since I was 6 years old and I haven't beaten it once until recently at 21. Over the years I've told myself I would beat this game but time after time, I got frustrated and left. But now as I had 100 percent completed Battle for Bikini Bottom Rehydrated half a year prior, I knew I had what it takes. So I sat myself down over a weekend and spent nothing but playing this game on the Xbox. I had to do it to fix the childhood trauma and get rid of the nagging feeling of never completing this game. After those 2 days and bringing the final boss to its knees, I lost a weight from my shoulders clinging on to me for almost 16 years. Let me tell you, for a children's game, it puts you through the fucking wringer. Unforgiving platforming and tough enemies combined with stiff 2000s platformer movement makes this something I'm surprised any kid has beaten. The game isn't very long with less than 20 levels since it had to come out along with the movie, but the devs added a bunch of different challenges just to increase the length. Not only do you have to complete the levels ranging from regular platforming to driving and sliding levels, but you also have to get a set amount of goofy goober tokens, the game's Stars to progress forward. Some of these you'll achieve through regular gameplay but most of them are through additional challenges. A few of them are easy like the arenas, bungee jumps and hidden area tokens but most of them are some of the most agonizing challenges I ever had to do in a game, let alone a CHILDREN'S GAME. Time trials and Ring challenges with the tightest time limits I've seen, platforming challenges over constantly moving blocks, guitar challenges with similar controls to the bubble missile from BFBB with extremely sharp turns, and the worst of them all: the spongeball challenges where you got to move a slippery ball through an obstacle course where any mistakes will send you back to the beginning. While I just ragged on the game's difficulty, I admire the developers' audacity to put all of these challenges in and sell it to kids. They deserve to have the challenge to show that they are smarter than people think because they need the confidence. I would just never recommend this version to them since the controls are way too dated and stiff for the game to be fun. This game deserves the Rehydrated treatment with updated visuals and controls with almost the same challenge so it could be brought to the next generation. May they never have to put up with what we had to deal with back in the day. The one thing I would fix the most is the cutscenes. Most of them are still images from the movie with narration and PowerPoint transitions and it's just pathetic.