SpongeBob SquarePants is one of those rare characters that appeals to kids and adults alike. The show has a combination of silliness, wry wit and cultural references that keeps it engaging for just about everyone. However, video games based on the franchise have typically been fairly shallow action-platformers that appealed only to younger fans of the sponge - and were typically not very good. Creature from the Krusty Krab looks to take a different approach, and you play as SpongeBob, Patrick and Plankton as they work their way through some crazy dreams!

The game is essentially a platformer mixed with some stylus 'poke & scrub' levels, with some creative uses of the innovative features of the Nintendo DS. And therein lies the problem - the mix and balance of the game types provides a paucity of actual gameplay variation and the use of the DS features feels gimmicky and not very well implemented. It's a lost opportunity, because at times the game shines and is pretty good fun.

The story is simple - you are living out the dreams of SpongeBob, Patrick and Plankton. Each one has things they desire or things they want to do, all of which involve either collecting stuff or having to clear things out of the way of a moving vehicle. For example, SpongeBob gets his driver's license, but needs to get the parts to build a race car and then needs help clearing his way on the race track and taking out opposing drivers. Collecting parts is a platform action sequence in which you climb levels, activate switches and levers, knock out enemies and jump jump jump! The race action is as simple as tapping debris on the track to clear the way, which can be somewhat problematic since SpongeBob switches lanes without regard for the path you are clearing, forcing you to try to clear all debris from the entire road. Periodically an opposing driver races in front of you and you need to quickly scrub over the driver's car to weaken them and force them out of the race.

The best thing about Krusty Krab is how it looks - while most of the game has the top screen showing the current character asleep in their bed, which lends itself to feeling more immersed in the license and the feeling of being inside the character's dreams. Bikini Bottom is captured very nicely by the graphics, which are bright and detailed without ever becoming too busy. Each of the characters has dreams in a different location, so the basic settings provide a solid amount of variety. The elements used in each setting are similar, making the areas feel somewhat repetitive after a while. The characters' appearance and animations are extremely well done - despite the small size on the lower screen they are captured in fantastic detail; I was amazed that I could see their facial expressions during platforming missions. In between each mission you get treated with clips from the cartoon series that work very well to further the plot and feeling of being part of the show.

Let's jump straight from best to worst - the controls are gimmicky and poorly implemented. Everything is done with the stylus, so instead of moving with the D-pad you swipe left to move left and swipe right to move right. You swipe up to jump and down to stop, tap enemies to stun them and tap item containers to release their stash. Each of these is problematic for a variety of reasons - but the worst is that the acceptance region for input around the characters is inconsistent, which makes the fact that you need two swipes to start and stop walking even more frustrating. There are times when you're trying to jump and nothing happens, or trying to knock out an enemy and nothing happens, which is the most frequent cause of taking damage or falling to your death; your input to stop before you walked off a cliff isn't accepted, or your attempt to stun an enemy doesn't work, or in a timed area you cannot get the combination of jumping and stopping working well enough to make it through a sequence before time expires and you have to start again. Some of these effects actually feel intentional, which is particularly irritating - there's a sequence near the beginning where they wanted to show how a jellyfish can escape the dream and torment the sleeping SpongeBob, so your input doesn't have any effect. That is acceptable, but in various stages you will come from an area where you have successfully completed tasks into one where you will have to try again and again to make it through. It feels as if the difficulty of that small area was increased to make the sequence more challenging. It doesn't work - instead you simply get annoyed with the game and assume it is buggy.

Everything else about the game falls somewhere between the graphics and controls in terms of quality. The soundtrack for the action sequences is pleasant and clearly inspired by the show, but the songs get repetitive and the audio during the cut scenes is muffled and low quality. The platformer levels look different for each character, but they play almost exactly the same - each character has a single special move they can do on a rare occasion, but otherwise each area consists of doing the same things with the same few interactive elements and dealing with the same few enemies. That is fairly common for platform games, but the variety here feels somewhat smaller than in many games. This is an area that shows how much games like New Super Mario Bros. shine and leaves Krusty Krab feeling average. The action sequences - and even the aforementioned jellyfish attacks - are also opportunities to break up the feeling of sameness, and they work to an extent. There are two problems with this however - first, they don't happen often enough and second, the most interesting mini-games are too short and infrequent, marking this as another missed opportunity.

My biggest disappointment with SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab is that by trying too hard to be trendy and make full use of the DS hardware the developers have turned a fun if unremarkable game into one that is annoyingly sub-par. Simply by allowing players to use the D-pad instead of the annoying swipe movement system, the game would have been much more fun and rectified all of the cheap death traps. This control scheme feels like what happened to some games released right after the DS was introduced, which were basically GBA games ported to the DS and altered to use every available input to make themselves look like DS-specific games. Most of those schemes failed badly and this effort isn't too much better. If you're a SpongeBob fan, get this for yourself on another platform.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).