Pros: I really can't think of any
Cons: Horrible racing. Extremely easy and boring campaign mode. Voices don't sound like the characters.
The bottom line: Avoid this game even if you are a Spongebob fan! Avoid this game even if you are a kid! Avoid this game!
After being impressed with the detail they put into The Battle for Bikini Bottom,I decided I'd check out the new Spongebob game out for the Wii.

The story in the game doesn't really feel like a Spongebob story, or even a story for that matter. It's just all over the place, almost like they just put in a story while they were developing the game. The game's story goes along the lines of extremely convoluted, here is an example of what it feels like:

Drive a race
Your driver's license is missing, go find it
Drive a race
Your car has taken damage, find parts for your car.
Drive a race
Go meet Sandy!
Drive a race

The game consists of two main gameplay parts. In the game, you are either driving your car in a race, or doing standard platforming. Both of these are incorporated into the story mode

The racing in the game is some of the worst racing I've ever played. You play as Spongebob in his car/boat. The levels are extremely wide, usually, that's a sign that it would be hard to crash, but not in this game. It's good that the levels are wide because the controls are no where near passable. What's wrong with the controls? It seems like having a driving game on the Wii would be fun because you just tilt the remote from side to side. Well, in this game, I find myself always trying to find the center of balance, where the Wii remote is perfectly horizontal. If it isn't perfectly balance, you will be turning into the way it's tilted. It should be easy to recover from a turn, but the turn is so dramatic even if you tilt it a millimeter that your first reaction will be to tilt it the opposite way, but then you do a dramatic turn that way, and it keeps on going like this, constant dramatic turns and the only way to recover is to find the center of balance when your going on a straight pathway, which can be hard to find. So throughout most of every race your going to be turning left and right over and over again, and you are likely to find that one balancing point for a few seconds, and then lose it when you have to take a turn.

Overall, the gimmick of having racing in this may have inspired some people to buy it. After the first race, the races are the part of the game that you wish you could avoid. The racing is absolutely horrible and I don't know how THQ could have screwed this one up so much. The racing besides having awful controls is so linear. Your car goes what seems like 15 miles an hour. Your car collects no damage. You can collect turbos. So what does it feel like? It feels like Mario Kart gone wrong. There was even a glitch in the driving where I crashed into a skid mark! They needed to tweak the controls and add weapons, while making your car go faster, right now it just feels like a game at it's early stages.

So the platforming part is really the other half of the game that you will be playing, and I am here to report, well the platforming game has a lot of the same errors as the racing part. It's really platforming at its earliest stages, making this feel extremely outdated. After the racing interlude comes in, you play a platforming level. So what do you do here? Well, it plays a lot like Battle for Bikini Bottom. You go around a level, you find what's in that level, and you progress to the next level. Sound exciting? It isn't. Literally every level follows this same concept. Each level has different very small sections where you have to find something. Not only is it extremely easy to find that thing, with literally no puzzles in it, but you have the game guiding you where to go.

The combat in this is so skill-less. You really have one attack, that's by pressing one button, this button flails your arms around in all different directions. Suppose 8 fish bad guys come near you and you press that button, it's likely that all of these fish will die from that attack. This attack is way too powerful for it's own good. Sometimes you will have to dash at your enemy to make him dazed first. To dash you have to thrust the nunchuck down. I do this over and over again and a lot of times it takes like 4 times to actually dash. After you dash, even if the guy is a 400 lb fish he'll still be killed with one attack of your flailing arms. I know this game is a kid's game, but really, the combat and puzzles in the game are too easy for kids an adults alike; there is absolutely no skill to it and anyone playing it will be bored after the first few minutes.

The graphics in the game look just like Battle for Bikini..... on the Playstation 2. The textures in the game are constantly repeated and they conversion of the players from being an animated cartoon look really strange. The characters are pixelated and cartoony, but really, they don't look any different than the Playstation 2 version of the Spongebob games. There are quite a few characters from the cartoon, so they weren't lazy with the game's graphics, they just pretty much used the same textures that they had in the older games.

The sound in the game is laughable. Well, they did it again, the voiceovers aren't the same from the show. Sure, there are a few people in the game that have the same voices, such as Mrs. Puff, Spongebob, and Plankton. Then you get to people such as Patrick, Patrick has a deep, almost pirate sounding voice that is downright laughable when shown next to his voice on the show. So how could they have fixed this? Well, I guess hiring the actual voice of Patrick is out of the question.... but they didn't have to have him say so many things. When you race Patrick he'll taunt you about every 5 seconds. The song you will hear in the game at the very beginning is the same you'll hear for an hour straight. There really aren't very many songs that are on the game, but they do sound like they are from the show. Songs that sound like they are straight off of a Hawaii surfer movie soundtrack.

So should you get this game? Well extreme die hard fans of the game may get it just to say that they've beat every Spongebob game, watched every show, and have every season on dvd. But if you aren't a fan of Spongebob, stay away! Even kids aren't likely to have a lot fun with this game. I'm giving this a 2/5; I would give a 1/5 but I think that some kids may like it. If you absolutely need a platformer experience on the Wii, just save $40 and get Super Mario 64, even if you've played through it before, you're going to have more fun with that than this.