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The Cosmic Shake is a good game. For an IP game, it's incredible; for a platformer it's polished and content in offering a style well known by fans of the series. You get exactly what you expect, and it delivers the world of Bikini Bottom absolutely beautifully.
Cosmic Shake improves on various flaws that Battle for Bikini Bottom presents. (The fan favorite title in the series.) Its story is much more episodic compared, bridging the intentions and proving its existence in this way. Each world calls back on previously established locals while adding enough new content to suffice and expand such aspects of the world not usually seen within the television series. One of the explicit reasoning behind the design of this game was to feel like you're in an episode, and it does it incredibly well.
The art direction is really well done. While some variations of aspects are a bit skewed from previous games and television alike, the charactures and movements are absolutely adorable. The dialogue, while not as witty and well timed as the sponge of old, it uses the platform presented to tell its story incredibly well. We get to see fan-favorite characters in situations they wouldn't normally find themselves in and it gives an excellent extra-dimension to these characters we've grown to love over the years. While most are still regarded with stereotypes that are common to themselves, it's still an intriguing step away from the normal formula that draws enough interest within itself. The locations are beautiful, and the art style is perfectly in synch despite drawing from differing genres for each world.
The level design leaves something to be desired, but doesn't withdraw from what was previously established in the series. The hub world is implemented in such a lovely way, letting us get a feel for the actual depth-of-local that Bikini Bottom has to offer, while still adding the previously mentioned story genre spin. The game feels like it's holding your hand and guiding you down each level, and while that is a perfectly fine aspect for a game based on a childrens televison title, there's little room to experience level-design outside of the intended ways. Levels feel somewhat segmented, an aspect that has been in outcry for change within the series sense the very first game was established. Each level takes you down one directional path, with some variation between. Some levels require segments of left-right strafing on-rails sections, while others have you doing various mini games to progress. They're beautifully implemented, but still leave something more to be desired, and ultimately adds to this feeling of not being able to experience the levels outside of one intended direction. If you had more impact on these locations, or if the platforming challenges where offset by puzzle-esc combat, it would feel much much more varied in this way. However, the formula is mostly to press forward, offset some enemies, and back to pressing forward again. This is not a problem for a title like this, as it serves to do what it presents extremely well, but for those who have been a fan of the games and grew up with them, it can feel incredibly stagnant to the series. Backtracking is done rather poorly here, as most needs to be done right at the end of the game, rendering the powerup given to do so rather lackluster compared to the abilities given earlier into the game. It doesn't give Reef Blower enough time to breath.
The combat is much, much better than in Battle for Bikini Bottom & The Movie Game. It feels like the enemy stereotyped "classes" are well established to themselves here, and with that comes an incredible sense of movement through Karate Kick and various Ground-Slam style attacks. However, there is still very little interaction between different enemy types and creating difficulty through inherencies crated between the placement of such. Due to the movement being almost perfected, the enemies almost feel like an afterthought. There's no set direction to take combat, and that in turn hurts the difficulty and reward of combat. The climax of the story, and the bossfight/s in particular are lacking extremely. While it's not any worse or any better than what previous games have to offer, I fear most will find it less memorable due to such. The final boss is pathetic, and doesn't do a good job at combining every aspect of what the player has learned and practiced over the course of the game, and that causes the end-game act to feel incredibly anticlimactic.
Overall, this is an incredibly definitive game to experience the Spongebob formula. Fans of the series have grown beyond the style presented, yet that doesn't take away from the expression, and absolute love Purple Lamp and company have put into every grain of sand that's gone into this project. It feels like a complete step up for the series, nostalgic bias' aside, though lacks in difficulty. It seeks to present itself in a definitive way, and does so with grace. The formula is good, the humor is on par for the course, and it's an absolutely lovely time all around. ~15 hours to 100%