Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots - PlayStation 2

This game was my childhood when i was little it was great to replay it

THIS WAS THE THIRD TIME IN MY ATTEMPTS TO ACQUIRE THIS GAME AS ADVERTISED. THIRD TIME IS A CHARM RIGHT? YOU GUYS HAVE PROVIDED ME WITH GREAT TIMING ON DELIVERIES AND GREAT QUALITY ITEMS! THANK YOU ONCE AGAIN!

Attack of the Toybots is the third in this miniseries. Has it learned the lessons from its older brothers? Or could this be the first black sheep of the foursome? Let’s look at it.The story is that Professor Calamitous is back once more. This time, he’s a contestant on a gameshow to become the biggest genius. His plan? Just try and follow me on this one. He’s going to feed krabby patties to fairies, which will make them gassy, and he will use this gas, along with ghost energy, to create an army of evil toys. Along side that, he’s made robot duplicates of famous Nicktoons heroes from other dimensions as master models for robots to lead this army of evil toys to conquer everything. I swear, hand on heart, I did not make that up. The story is beyond silly, but it’s the token “stop the bad guy” kind of deal, but those never get old for me, so let’s give the story a pass and move on.For gameplay, you control one of our heroes to fight enemies, navigate tricky areas, and save the worlds. Who are our heroes in this outing? Returning from Volcano Island, we have Spongebob Squarepants and Patrick Star (Spongebob Squarepants) Danny Phantom and Sam Manson (Danny Phantom) Jimmy Neutron (Jimmy Neutron) And Timmy Turner (Fairly Odd Parents). Newcomers include Tak (Tak and the Power of Juju) Rocko (Rocko’s Modern Life) Stimpy (Ren and Stimpy), GIR (Invader Zim) and XJ9 or Jenny (My Life as a Teenage Robot). However, the latter four don’t feel like they were fully fleshed out as the other heroes.They don’t appear in any cutscenes, their names are never mentioned past the opening credits, and they don’t have any special mini games dedicated to them. In fact, the only ones who do are Spongebob, Danny, and Tak, but we’ll get there later. If they weren’t going to give them any spotlight beyond playing as them, why include them? If memory serves, Invader Zim was at the peak of its popularity, while Teenage Robot was steadily gaining ground, but Rocko’s Modern Life and Ren and Stimpy had been cancelled for years by the time this game came out. Were they planning on doing more with them, but ran out of time? Or were they just subtly saying “Hey, these shows exist, you should watch them.” I guess we’ll never know.Anyway, gameplay is a mostly 2.5D Platformer, where players must run, jump, and fight through an army of evil toys and tricky platforming. And when I say Tricky Platforming, I mean it. This game really ramped up the challenge from Volcano Island. In that game, the amount of times I died could be counted on one hand. This game? My death toll was somewhere in the triple digits. A lot of these platforming sections have no margin for error. One mistake and you’re dead. Luckily, checkpoints are frequent and you have infinite lives, so if you have the patience, you will beat them. Just be prepared for a lot of second tries. For those who thought Volcano Island was too easy, this is exactly what the doctor ordered.For combat, you have your basic melee attacks, a ground pound, and three kinds of goo. These are pickups that shoot goo at your enemies, and it will be your best friend for a variety of reasons. For one, it’s good for picking off enemies from a distance, since some of them explode after defeating them and the explosion can throw you off a cliff and force you to redo the fighting, but it can also break the capsules that house fairies. Yes, there’s a whole armada of captured fairies. Each container you find of them contain five. There’s a total of five hundred fairies to rescue. That sounds like a tall order but the game throws them at you like candy out of a pinata, so if you’re actively looking for them, you’ll find enough to save them all. Most of them are out of reach for melee attacks, hence the goo.Jorgan Von Strangle (The big, buff, Arnold Schwarzenegger inspired fairy) is constantly dangling a prize over your head, a cutscene for every one hundred fairies you save reminds you of this prize. For those of you who suck at math, I’ll save you the trouble. Each container has five fairies, so that’s one cutscene for every twenty containers. The payoff is…a secret, but it did get a rise out of me.There are also extra areas to travel into, only certain characters can, indicated by their image on the pipe. These lead to those mini games. Like I said, only Spongebob, Danny, and Tak get their own special mini game, and they are proceeded by a cutscene. For everyone else, it's the standard reach the end without dying affair. Spongebob’s mini game is sliding down sewer pipes on his tongue…better him than me. Danny’s Mini games are flying shooter stages where he must navigate a maze and destroy ghost energy containers to reach the end within a time limit. If you have a turbo controller, it will do your thumb a huge favor. Lastly, Tak’s games are a jungle gym, a harrowing platforming section like the ones in the main game.These games also have little room for error and will require a few attempts to complete. At the end of the mini games is a small room where a master model is held. Clear out the enemies, hit the button, and climb to the top to hit another button, and then you have your master model. Sometimes this will get you a new character to play as, others just a still image of others from other shows. Again, a lot of these were probably just shoehorning in other shows however they’d fit, reminding you to watch the cartoons. Some of the shows I’d even forgotten about until I saw the characters.Some of the characters you need aren’t given to you right away, so you have to come back later with that character, adding some replay value. One nice thing is that the factory levels, where all the characters are unlocked and where two thirds of the gameplay happens, they are broken up into sections and you can replay them whenever you want, and the game even tells you which character is needed to unlock which master model, which rules out the guesswork. While you’ll find most of these pathways on the way to the exit, others are off the beaten path and you may miss them on your first few runs through the section.While playing, keep your eyes out for circuits. These are blue cubes that the game throws at you like old ladies throwing bread crumbs to pidgins. These are the game’s currency and are needed to purchase new costumes for our heroes. Costumes don’t really do anything but look cool. Lastly, there are two stages where our heroes pilot mechs. These are dual stick shooter stages and they’re really fun. Sadly, there’s only two in the game. I would have loved there to be more. One final note, the game does have multiplayer, but I was not able to test this part out so I cannot say what that is like.Though, there are a few parts that didn’t quite hit the mark. For one thing, there are no boss fights. The game doesn’t have a big send off, so if you were expecting some big final battle like the other two games had, you’ll be disappointed. Also, those platforming sections can be way more annoying than they have any right to be. It all boils down to trial and error memorization. And there’s so many times I got killed by something flying in from off screen that I didn’t see coming. For the most part, just as these sections were starting to irritate me, I’d get by them. But every now and then, one of these sections was enough to make me want to pull my hair out.And while Combat starts out fun, since you’re fighting the same enemies in a lot of areas that don’t look that much different from each other, it starts to get old after a while. Luckily, for the most part you can just walk by the enemies if you don’t want to fight them, but being a beat ‘em up, every now and then, the game will lock you in an area and not let you by until you break a certain quota of toys.For presentation, the game does put some effort in. All the characters look like they should, and the voice acting is done well. Even GIR, Jenny, Rocko, and Stimpy who, like I mentioned, don’t get any screen time beyond playing as them, have lines of dialogue. As you play, your characters make comments. The music stops, they say the line, then the music starts again.However, Rocko hardly says anything. For a while I thought he didn’t even have lines. I can only recall two lines from him, and even when the music stops, nine times out of ten, he remains silent. Either there’s a glitch that prevents him from speaking as much as the others, or they didn’t record many lines for him and didn’t want him to constantly spit out the same two lines. And yeah, the banter can be repetitive and get annoying after a while, but it’s not a deal breaker. Speaking of music, it works for the most part. It’s overall forgettable, but it gets the job done.So that’s Attack of the Toybots. How does it stack up? While the extra helping of tricky platforming was a welcome change of pace, and the fairy side quest kept me breaking containers until I got my “reward”, the repetitive combat and lack of bosses might steer away most casual gamers. IF you’re a die hard nicktoons fan, you’ll probably enjoy the nods and references to other cartoons, even if all they got was just a cardboard cutout of one or two characters from the show. Still, the game is not completely awful and if you enjoyed Volcano Island, you’ll probably have a good time here. If you can find it for a reasonable price at your local game store, I guess you could do worse.

The video game came complete with case, cover art, manual and disc. It's been tested to the loading screen and it works just fine. Can't wait to play it in the future!

The media could not be loaded. I never leave reviews but this made me really disappointed. I ordered this game for me to play because I played it as a kid. I was so excited when it finally came in and IT DOESNT WORK!! At first I thought my PS2 was broken but I knew it wasn’t because all of my other games work just fine! THE SCREEN IS BLACK!! I can hear the menu music but I can’t see it!! No matter what I do I can’t see the game at all!! I understand this is an old game on an old gaming console but sellers need to make sure a product works before shipping it.

I bought this for nostalgia reasons. I played it for two hours and realized that the game was wacko. I had to play through like a dozen levels before they finally gave me a layout of the map - after I had already explored 1/5 of it. They explained nothing in the game and in the booklet in the case. The puzzles got pretty repetitive and I got tired of playing. Why did I like this game?

Very impressed

Fun game.