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The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie Review - Xbox

The Smile, The laugh, the pants Get in touch with your inner Bob.

Join SpongeBob and Patrick to a mysterious place that no sea creature has ever returned from. Save Mr. Crabs and all of Bikini Bottom from Planktons evil plans. SpongeBob Squarepants Movie will take you to an all new level of excitement, reaching out to children showing them that gaming is for everybody. Master the moves of SpongeBob and Patrick as you travel through vast worlds trying to bring Plankton to justice.

Gameplay

As you move around the world, you'll find this game is set up the same as most 3rd person adventure games. Health comes in the form of hamburgers, which only lights up when you don't have full health. This is a great little way to keep you from getting health when you don't need it. You start off with 3 hamburgers, and you can increase them when you upgrade. To upgrade your stats, you need to collect the currency in the SpongeBob world. This stuff is everywhere, and comes in different colours depending on how much it contains. Once you reach a certain amount as noted in the top right corner, the interface will tell you to push the Back button to reach the upgrade screen.

Around the world there are buttons that you need to press to activate different things, such as new jumps, or to reveal the next part of the world. You'll find most of the world is destructible, but only the cube shaped boxes contain currency. The rest of the world is brightly coloured with anything and everything that the developers could think of, including mushrooms, candy canes, and basically anything to get young ones craving food. The whole world is set underwater which runs in line with the cartoon itself of course. After the first couple of missions, you get to jump in the seat of your sandwich car and race through town. The sandwich car handles alright, and it gets a bit fun when you're using the turbo through the town that's being mass destructed. Once racing through the town, you can either go back to your storyline, or continue with racing challenges for more points.

Occasionally you reach a special Combat zone where you'll get waves of attacks. This is about as exciting as the combat gets, and you'll compete on a large field. When you complete it successfully, similar to when you complete a normal level, you're granted a Goofy Goober Token which can be used to purchase new moves. These Goofy Goober Tokens can also be acquired when you beat bosses, and complete other difficult tasks. You'll need these tokens to learn new moves to get past certain parts of the game, so you'll probably find yourself backtracking in order to gain enough tokens to progress.

The main menu (continued next page)