Review: Flipping Burgers With Finesse In SPONGEBOB: KRUST COOK-OFF
When you think of SpongeBob Square Pants in a video game, you don’t imagine surprisingly entertaining gameplay, high-quality systems, and a long replay value. But SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off for the Nintendo Switch is fairly addicting and somewhat difficult. It isn’t an innovative or profound game, but it runs fairly smoothly and entertains enough. And it might not have the craziest or creative mechanics, it serves as a great port of a mobile game to the Nintendo Switch.
The gameplay is pretty straightforward. Players get orders from customers and have to fill them by cooking pancakes, assembling crabby patties, or making milkshakes. As players progress, they are able to unlock new restaurants, new bonuses, new decorations, and new characters. It’s a pretty standard mobile game format, but it’s nice to see it well transferred to the Nintendo Switch, using buttons, not the touch screen. Because it is a one-time purchase game, everything is unlockable with time and in-game currency. The gameplay progresses well and is get surprisingly difficult and engaging.
The SpongeBob theme and setting are all perfectly translated from the TV show. There are tons of jokes and hidden things that allude to the show. Between eating a bucket of nails to some of the specific customers, there are a lot of things to find and enjoy if you are a big fan of the show. I do wish that things were unlocked with a bit more consistency and a bit quicker, but it is still pretty well-paced.
While the gameplay is simple and fun, there are quite a few bugs. I would say about 90% of the levels worked just fine, but the other 10% would have some issue of some kind. These issues would be visual issues where customers were invisible, certain food items wouldn’t register when highlighted, and other minor bugs. It isn’t very problematic, but it does appear often enough to not be surprised when it happens.
SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off does its job well. It stands as a progressive arcade game that has lots of hours of content. The content might be a bit buggy and relatively repetitive, but it is a good way to kill some time if you want to play something that is easy to pick up and put down.
