SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans Of The Tide Review – Mostly Ghostly

Perhaps my favorite childhood game of all time is Heavy Iron Studios’ SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, a strange anomaly licensed game from the early 2000s that somehow ended up being fantastic in its own right. With tight platforming, tons of worlds to explore, sometimes based on a single episode, and three playable characters all with different powers, it was extraordinarily well thought out. And having (almost) the entire voice cast return from the TV Show helped quite a lot, too.

In 2020, THQ Nordic heard the cries of fans like myself and brought on Austrian developer Purple Lamp Studios to remake Battle for Bikini Bottom for modern consoles, with several key staff from Heavy Iron Studios having moved to this new studio. Even more exciting, 2023 brought us a direct sequel to Battle for Bikini Bottom, SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake, which I thoroughly enjoyed. The new game, SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide, is the third game in this series and takes the franchise in a different direction than I had anticipated.

The premise is pretty simple: King Neptune and The Flying Dutchman get into a fight at the Krusty Krab, and the mixing of their magic powers causes an explosion that not only turns everyone in Bikini Bottom into ghosts – it brings over a variety of ghost enemies from the other side. SpongeBob and Patrick find that because of their BFF rings, they are able to swap in an instant between one of them being a ghost and the other in their normal, corporeal form, which forms the mechanical foundation for Titans of the Tide. Our heroes board the Flying Patty, a Final Fantasy-esque airship Mr. Krabs has procured, and begin traveling around the sea in an attempt to rescue the surviving citizens and find a way to put things right again.

Bikini Bottom is divided into 5 very large worlds that SpongeBob and Patrick will platform their way across on this roughly 8-hour adventure, which is probably my biggest issue with Titans of the Tide. Battle for Bikini Bottom was made up of 14 different worlds of a smaller size, and each with small challenges inside that granted Golden Spatulas (essentially a direct rip of the structure of Super Mario 64). This provided a lot of variety in level design, enemies, and opportunities for quick serotonin bursts getting a spatula every 15 minutes or so.

Titans of the Tide essentially features the objective of “get to the end of the level”, which is fine, but it also makes me miss the little challenges that would grant a quick victory dance here and there and make the number in the corner go up. There are plenty of small challenges and collectibles, however, some, like the 10 Golden TVs, are very difficult to find (I only found 2 during the whole game, and I looked hard). Mostly, your rewards will be new skins for SpongeBob and Patrick, of which there are many, and new items from each level with which to decorate the Floating Patty.

Titans of the Tide is, without a doubt, the most challenging SpongeBob game I have played, and it might be one of the harder 3D platformers I’ve played as well. The main mechanic of instantly swapping back and forth between SpongeBob and Patrick is utilized frequently to great success, and compounds the difficulty of the platforming sections in a very pleasing way. Both characters can double jump, glide, air dash, dodge, and use a basic melee attack. SpongeBob has a bubble wand that can flip switches and trap enemies from a distance, while Patrick can pick up and throw things and use a tether to either pull items towards him or pull himself towards larger objects.

These abilities work very well with the level design, and by the time you’re in the second world, you’re utilizing every one of them every few seconds. I have found the most fun parts of the game to be in the pure platforming part of it, sometimes having to switch between SpongeBob and Patrick 3-4 times mid-jump and activate abilities with precision timing to progress.

The main levels are difficult enough (in a great way), but if you hunger for more, you can head to Mr. Krabs’ office for some juiced-up challenges as well. Although I’m a bit disappointed in the sameness of the environments, the platforming has been nonstop fun, with a few drops of sweat surprisingly making their way to my forehead.

Combat is mostly the same as the previous games, although much improved over The Cosmic Shake, as every battle doesn’t lock you in a small arena to fight waves of monsters. Enemies are more freely spaced out along the levels in groups of anywhere from 3 to 20 at a time, which paces the game well. I have noticed the animations can be a bit jarring and stilted with the enemies, especially when they get trapped in bubbles. Although it didn’t bother me too much, a lot of the animations felt flat-out unfinished, and you can tell this game was done on a budget.

I also only counted seven regular enemy types, excluding the bosses, which is about the same as the previous games; however, I’d argue that two or three more enemy varieties would have massively improved Titans of the Tide. I really enjoyed the heavy enemies, as Patrick’s tether works to pull you towards them across the field, massively changing up fights and stopping them from getting repetitive.

I also had a lot of fun with the boss fights. They were unique enough that they didn’t seem to reuse any mechanics, but also still relied strongly on precision platforming and not as much on combat skills, which is something that I appreciate in games like this. Although I only died a few times during the game, all of those deaths were due to platforming mistakes, not the combat, which helped in not feeling like I was halting progress.

The Switch 2 version of Titans of the Tide also has a very unusual bug I’ve never seen before. In the options, there is a toggle for quality mode (4k 30 FPS) or performance mode (1080p 60 FPS). I played the game in performance mode, which mostly works but struggles to stay at 60 frames when rendering too many moving objects at once. Every time, without fail, when I suspended or closed the game, when I opened it again, it would be moving at 30 FPS. This happened both handheld and docked. In the options, it still had performance mode turned on, but was simply running at 30 FPS. Every time I opened the game, I had to change it to quality mode, hit apply, and then change it back to performance mode and hit apply, and then voila – it was working. This was an annoying, albeit not game-interrupting bug, but I’m shocked that it happened every single time.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed Titans of the Tide. I’d definitely recommend it over The Cosmic Shake, but it certainly doesn’t reach the heights of Battle for Bikini Bottom. With it being priced very reasonably at $40, I’d have a hard time not recommending this for any 3D platforming fans, even if it feels a tad unpolished. The music was a little underwhelming as well, perfectly serviceable but not up to par with the SpongeBob franchise’s usual ukulele-based bangers.

It’s easy to make a game like this “hard” by simply making the levels nearly impossible to beat, but Titans of the Tide feels organic in its difficulty, building the skills you’ve used in each previous section on top of each other. Plus, the entire voice cast from the show is back, and there are a few good laughs to be had.  Grab a controller, chill out, and get ready to shift into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE! Hiya!

Nirav reviewed SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide on Nintendo Switch 2 with his own bought copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.