Nickelodeon The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

Patrick as equipment is the idea that holds this one together. He can be picked up and hurled at switches, used as a shield against thrown objects, or lobbed onto a target to trigger a shared move, and the level design leans on that far more than the previous Heavy Iron game leaned on SpongeBob's bubble tricks. It turns a licensed platformer about a sponge into something closer to a two-character puzzle box, even though only one of you is ever holding the controller.

The 2004 film gave the studio a straight line to follow, and the game follows it: the road trip out of Bikini Bottom, the Patty Wagon, the trench, the grim stretches near Shell City. Compared with Battle for Bikini Bottom, which sent you back through hub worlds to sweep up hundreds of trinkets, this is a more linear march. Goofy Goober tokens still accumulate and unlock moves and extras, but the pacing is stricter and the levels end when they should. That is a fair trade for anyone who bounced off the earlier game's backtracking.

Combat is simple and stays simple. Bubble attacks, a karate chop, a bowling-ball bubble for crowds, plus the cooperative throws. Where the game finds variety is in the interruptions: Patty Wagon driving stages, Mr. Krabs' patty-assembly minigames, and a few chase sequences that ask for reflexes rather than platforming precision. Not all of them land. The vehicle sections in particular have the loose handling common to tie-ins of the period, where the car feels like it is negotiating with the road.

What holds up is the presentation. The cel-shaded look matches the show's flatness better than most cartoon adaptations of the sixth generation managed, and the original voice cast turning up for dialogue between stages does real work in keeping the tone right. Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke are not phoning it in, and the script has the film's specific streak of melancholy about growing up.

It was made to a deadline and a licence, and you can see the seams in places where a stage repeats an idea rather than developing it. But Heavy Iron clearly understood what the character could carry, and a platformer built around throwing your best friend at problems is a stranger, more inventive thing than the box art suggests.