Spongebob SquarePants: Plankton’s Robotic Revenge may be the least entertaining piece of media the little yellow sponge has ever starred in. Despite his success on screens big and small, the charm and whimsy do not translate into this short and mind-numbing 3D beat-em-up. As a person who loves SpongeBob, I saw nothing but missed opportunities for references or jokes that could have been included to add some humor to the dry, repetitive combat.
This so-called adventure starts out with a jarring 30-second cutscene that outlines a familiar plotline: Plankton trying to get the Krabby Patty formula, this time with an army of robots to help him out. What follows is nothing special at best and a boring slog at worst. Playing as SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, Squidward, or Mr. Krabs, you must tackle the three levels in the campaign, each taking roughly an hour to complete. Each character has a terribly underpowered melee attack that eventually becomes only useful in smashing crates, a “Special Move” that (as far as I can tell) just makes your character glow, and an arsenal of unremarkable ranged weapons.
These weapons, called Gizmos, fit many of the same weapon types you may be familiar with. The Pickle Blaster, for example, is just a standard assault rifle while other Gizmos act as grenade launchers, shotguns, rail guns, etc. I found myself constantly coming back to only one or two different weapons though, because that’s pretty much all you need.Upgrading Gizmos using collected sprockets is the only real goal to aim for in most levels outside of dragging yourself to the end. Each Gizmo has three upgrades, but they mostly just make the Gizmo do more damage. A curious thing I noticed is that sprocket collections are tied to each characters, so if I am playing as SpongeBob for a while, then switch to Patrick, I will not have any unlocked Gizmos or collected sprockets. So why would I ever switch?
Gameplay is very simplistic, and most of the time I found myself just holding down the shoot button while running around blasting the same six or seven uninteresting and repetitive enemy types until I’d cleared out that bland area, then moving on to the next. Repeat until you get to the end of the level and fight a boss. There is no variety at all.
If you want to play Plankton’s Robotic Revenge co-op, dropping in is very easy to do – though nothing really changes, not even the amount of enemies in a given area. The only added mechanic is that you can revive your fallen allies by standing near them for a few seconds, which is so easy to do that it basically eliminates the very minor fear of failure you have while playing solo.