The folk over at Purple Lamp have become one of my favourite platformer developers thanks to their efforts creating and bringing back to life SpongeBob SquarePants video games. What originally started with the remake of Battle for Bikini Bottom soon spiralled into the excellent The Cosmic Shake, and now, a couple of years later, we have the third dish in this feast, a project known as SpongeBob SquarePants: Titans of the Tide.
If you've played either of the past two SpongeBob games from Purple Lamp, you'll find Titans of the Tide instantly familiar. The premise and story may be unique and different, but the gameplay structure and the tone, and generally the way that this project is put together befits the formula that Purple Lamp has been presenting for some time, and there's both good and bad to that.
For one, it still works. As far as a platformer experience goes, an adventure that will take you at most 12 hours to beat if you're hunting for every collectible, it's still fun and has enough humour and unique levels to explore that you will come away satisfied. However, it's also a game that is perhaps a bit too familiar as it never really serves up many truly unique gameplay mechanics or ideas. The movement and jumping works the exact same way, the combat is practically identical, there's still familiar puzzle-solving, race-like setups down enormous slides, and costumes to unlock to customise the experience. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing that it's so similar, but I do wish there was more innovation and evolution in this game, especially considering how The Cosmic Shake felt like a fulfilling upgrade over the updated Battle for Bikini Bottom.
What Purple Lamp has cooked up with this game is an entertaining platformer with all the right hallmarks of the franchise. You have uniquely stylised levels that each pose their own challenges and offer slightly unique mechanics to master. There's a story that feels authentically SpongeBob, in part to the use of daft humour and also in part down to the appearances of the real voice actors who do their jobs in a way that nobody else possibly could. There's awards to complete and side quests to tick off, bosses to bust up, and costumes to unlock, and all of this is fine in practice, but again, I can't help but feel as though there's something missing here.
The first couple of levels never betray that Titans of the Tide is perhaps pulling its punches, as it ramps up the new elements at a good rate and plays with level design and compelling narrative events. But once you reach the third level, the feeling of familiarity starts seeping out of every crack and the wonder of the experience starts fading away. It becomes evident that Purple Lamp wasn't exactly able to keep up the pace and the level of expansion, as we find ourselves in chapters and levels that get shorter and shorter and that offer less features of note. It's not a massive detraction of regression, but if you had to phrase it in words, Titans of the Tide begins as a "great" platformer and steadily slips into "good" territory, perhaps even "mediocre" at times...
The big key element in this game is the dual-protagonist format where you can instantly switch between SpongeBob and Patrick. It somewhat resembles The Cosmic Shake in that the protagonist who has been "tagged out" floats along the main hero as a ghostly companion similar to the Patrick balloon from the former game. What this system does enable is the introduction of slightly different mechanics depending on the character in question, with Patrick able to lift heavy items and burrow underground whereas SpongeBob can use a Bubble Wand and karate kick across certain gaps. The game is at its best when it asks the player to quickly swap and change between the two characters, chaining their unique mechanics together for intricate combos that exploit the level design. But there's a second side to the coin in that the level structure only infrequently requires this level of complexity, meaning a lot of the time you wander around as one character and swap over when there's necessity to use the other's abilities.
I do appreciate that Purple Lamp is trying something different with this dual-hero approach, but it comes across as two half-complete characters rather than two fully-fledged and complex main characters. And this is perhaps the story of Titans of the Tide as a whole, as some of the levels are too rudimentary and basic to stand out, the additional challenges don't invoke much thrill, and the additional "icing on the cake" of Plankton's challenge mode is incredibly disappointing and doesn't do much at all to inspire.
Perhaps my expectations for this game were too high, but Titans of the Tide does feel like a regression of Purple Lamp's gameplay formula, and this particularly stings as everything else about the title is just as excellent as the former chapter. The tone is spot on, the art style is colourful and fun, the performances and dialogue are hilarious, and it plays smoothly without issues or hitches too. In a way, this game reminds me of Mafia: The Old Country or Dying Light: The Beast, in that both are fine games but compared to former instalments in their respective series, they do feel a bit safe, reserved, or too concise. Again, I bring it all back to my former statement about Titans of the Tide, with this beginning as a "great" platformer and steadily slipping into "good" territory, and occasionally slightly below even that.
