Nicktoons: Battle For Volcano Island (PS2) Review

 Nicktoons: Battle for Volcano Island (PS2) 4.5/10

Hey guys. Back with another review. Today, I’ll be going over the second installment of the Nicktoons games: Battle for Volcano Island. BfVI was released on October 24, 2006, a year after the first game, for the PS2 and GameCube. The game was developed by Blue Tongue Entertainment, Atari, Halfbrick Studios, and Natsume with the publisher being THQ. Now I have played this game in the past and when I was a child, this was one of my favorite games on the PS2. Revisiting it now, the game is not as good as I remember it to be. Let's jump into this.

Our story follows Spongebob Squarepants, Danny Phantom, Patrick Star, Sam Manson, Timmy Turner, and Sandy Cheeks as they try to save Volcano Island and its residents from the evil god Mawgu, who is threatening the existence of all the other worlds. To help them on their quest, Tucker, Squidward, and Jimmy Neutron will be aiding them. The whole gang was summoned here by The Wise Old Crab, who knew all of this was going to happen through a prophecy.

This story sucks. Honestly I liked the plot for the first game more than this. The whole old Pacific Island god trying to destroy the world is somewhat unique but at the same time is stupid for a Nicktoons crossover game. Again, this whole game only exists for the characters to interact with each other, just like with the first game. Even the interactions between all of the characters is lackluster. I also find it weird that Danny and Spongebob are the main focus while everyone else feels like side characters.

From the technical side of things, the game runs smoothly, but I did have issues with one of the bonus levels where platforms were glitching out, making me unable to finish it. Other than this and minor bugs and glitches, the game runs fine. There were also some lip syncing issues where the audio had a two second delay. I was already almost done with the game, so it's whatever.

Battle for Volcano Island looks exactly the same as the first game. No graphical upgrades or better animations. Even the backgrounds look similar in style. At least now there’s no weird, off-putting portraits for the characters lol. The animations also look the same. Again, no technical improvements in this department. Literally looks like they ripped assets straight from the first game with no improvement.

The sound design is bad. Thankfully the music isn’t as mind numbing as the first game, but it’s still bad. No memorable tracks, although for Spongebob and Patrick’s bonus levels were annoying as fuck and I had to mute the game to get through them.

Voice acting is one of the few saving graces for the game. All of the original voice actors came back for the game and they sound great. The Wise Old Crab sounded terrible though. Thank God I don’t have to listen to his voice anymore.

Now onto gameplay. Just like the first game, BfVI is a 3D beat ‘em up with up to two players, four playable characters per level. For each level, the game will have you play as a specific set of characters, with Danny and Spongebob being in every level. Why the game doesn’t let you choose who you want in your party is beyond me. Hell, Timmy and Sandy are only playable in 2 levels. Anyway, now this game has made some changes to how things work. In this you can double jump 😮! I know right. Shocker. Each character also has one basic attack and a projectile they can shoot (except Patrick, who does cart wheels, killing himself half of the time cause he rolls off the cliff). By streamlining all of the characters to work the same, I hardly had any reason to play as anyone else besides my favorite character of the group (which was usually Danny, Spongebob, or Sam). Speaking of, Sam has the Fenton Peeler, and if she picks up a battery, she’ll have infinite ammo for a short period of time. This made her the best character in the game. I wish all of the other characters had something like this. I miss the teamwork aspect from the previous game as this is just a basic beat 'em up with light platforming and no puzzles.

There are a handful of levels here, giving it decent length. In almost each level are salvage items for each character. If you collect all of the salvage items for each character, you’ll unlock their bonus stage. I’ll get to this in just a minute. There’s also collectables for each character. If you collect X amount of a certain item, you’ll unlock a different outfit for that respective character. Each character has a different outfit that’s a reference to something from their respective shows (Danny’s power suit, Sam’s prom dress, Spongebob’s pirate outfit, etc.)

The game has a hub world: Camp Castaway. In the camp, you’ll be able to see everyone’s temporary houses being built out of island resources. You’ll also be needing to explore the camp in order to get to the next main mission. You can also find a zoo here, which will hold all of the enemies and wildlife that’s on the island. You can also revisit any past level at the camp in the pause menu.

So each character has a bonus level for you to run through if you collect all of their salvage. For Tucker, if you collect all of his salvage, you’ll get the movie theater where you can rewatch scenes from the game. This is a huge missed opportunity as I was hoping you can also view scenes from all of the shows. If you collect all of Squidward’s salvage, you’ll unlock the Art Gallery. I didn’t bother going in here as I unlocked it after I beat the game. I’m assuming you’ll be able to see concept art for the game, which is nice. Now onto the bonus levels. Each level is separated into 3 parts, and each part is a race. You gotta platform through the levels and reach the ending before the timer runs out. All of the bonus levels are races, which is disappointing. Each race is themed to the character (Spongebob will be running through Jellyfish Fields, Danny through the Ghost Zone, Timmy through Fairy World, etc). These races weren’t necessarily hard, but really annoying to deal with, except Sam’s. I don’t know who the fuck designed her bonus level, but they need to be slapped. Narrow platforms, frame perfect jumps, shitty camera angle, horrible respawn points, and glitched platforms that weren’t popping up. Because of all of this plus platforms straight up not showing up, I was unable to finish her bonus level.

Overall, this game is a disappointment and it saddens me that the game is like this. I enjoyed this game a lot when I was younger and now that I have taken the nostalgia goggles off, it’s just a bad game. Not the worst thing ever, but still. It’s bad. I can’t recommend this to anyone unless you want to revisit your childhood. Hopefully Attack of the Toybots will be better.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.