Thank you Tilting Point for sending us a review code!

SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off is a casual cooking simulator featuring everyone's favorite (or the world's most infamous) sea sponge and all his friends. It's essentially Cooking Mama, Cooking Fever, or Overcooked with a SpongeBob theme slapped on top. Start out running a new pancake stand, work your way to the Krusty Krab to flip burgers, and then head to Sandy's to launch a new BBQ restaurant. You'll be tasked with cooking and fulfilling orders for hungry customers as quickly as possible. Between levels, use the cash gained to upgrade your cooking station, restaurant decor, and restaurant furniture style. These upgrades determine how quickly food cooks, how much money will be earned by serving various food items, and how much extra money you earn in tips when you serve food quickly. You can also earn tickets to visit the local claw machine to try and win clothing items for SpongeBob and the other unlockable cooks. Clothing items level up each cook, improving their Special Abilities and reducing the cooldown timer between when you can fire said abilities off.

If those last few things I mentioned make it sound like this is a mobile game, that's because it is. While the review code sent to us was for the latest release on Steam, it was immediately apparent that this game had all the trappings of a modern mobile game: multiple forms of in-game currency, stars earned by completing levels that then work toward unlocking chests with loot inside, a gacha mechanic in the form of the claw machine, it was all there. So I did my research. Krusty Cook-Off was originally released on iOS and Android back in 2020, with another release on the Microsoft Store the same year. This free-to-play version has ads and in-app purchases, with one purchase being to disable ads. Launching the app version pops up a Terms & Conditions window that asks you your birth month and year, asking you to agree to the ToS, and also asking if you're okay with them sharing your data (this box can be left unchecked). The mobile versions have a stamina bar; use gems as the second in-game currency necessary to unlock upgrades (which you earn by watching ads); and puts in place delays before your upgrades will actually be delivered, which you can speed up by spending more gems. The mobile version also has events, because what mobile game worth its salt doesn't have every square inch of screen real estate covered by glittering, flashing icons with big red exclamation points that are an anxiety-inducing eyesore?

Then in 2021, exclusively for the Nintendo Switch, Tilting Point released the game as the "Extra Krusty Edition", designed to bring "all of the fun of the original with none of the grind!" Later, a physical edition for the Switch was released that included an area called "New Kelp City" which wouldn't be released as DLC for the Switch for digital edition owners until just this year. The digital version, the one with New Kelp City excluded as separate DLC, is the one that would eventually be released again for the PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and finally Steam. The "Extra Krusty Edition" removes the wait timers, the gems, the stamina bar, and the events, leaving a much cleaner user interface than its mobile counterpart. The descriptions for the game on each console's online storefront imply that each release has different unique abilities or items specific to that version, but I cannot verify whether or not that is true. What I CAN verify is that the DLC area is locked, with many a sign claiming that those features will be "Coming soon!" in a separate, presumably extra-cost add-on.

So the background surrounding this Krusty Cook-Off and its various releases is already messier than a herd of cows in a laxatives factory. The mobile game aesthetic was a major red flag to me as soon as I launched the game, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who would feel that way. However, once you get through the first few rounds of tutorials, the gameplay is pretty simple and moderately fun. On launch, the game warned me that I should definitely be using a controller; Krusty Cook-Off is compatible with all major controllers, and the icons on screen matched my DualShock 4 without needing to configure anything first. Whereas the mobile version expects you to tap on each item in order to fulfill orders, the console edition divides your kitchen area into multiple zones, like one zone for the grill, one for plating, and one for drinks. You use the control pad or left thumbstick to navigate between the active zone, and each zone maps the controller's buttons to do different things. For example, Circle will transfer ready food from the grill to the plating station if pressed in the grill zone, and it will add a specific topping to a cooked dish if it is pressed in the plating zone.

The control scheme is simple enough to be able to rapidly prepare orders without getting too lost, but just confusing enough to be occasionally frustrating. The hardest part is when you get to serving up items that have multiple ingredients. For example, when making a krabby patty, a customer can order it with cheese, onion, cheese and onion, lettuce, tomato, or lettuce and tomato. If you have two ready patties on your plating station and someone asks for one patty with onion and another with cheese and you press [Cheese] then [Onion], you'll make a single patty with cheese and onion and have to try again. The only way to avoid this is to press [Cheese], serve the burger, then [Onion], then serve that burger. So you don't get to pick which patty to add the toppings to. You also don't get to choose which customer gets it; the game will sometimes take an order you were making for one customer and split it between two when you just wanted to focus on one customer at a time as they entered. It's hard to say if these are intentional to increase difficulty or just limitations that they didn't find a better way to fix, but it's a minor nuisance in an otherwise clean control scheme.

One thing I will say is that customers seem to get mad and leave way faster than I would expect from a game marked "casual". Every level feels like I'm working at breakneck speed to keep up with customer demand. I actually think this might be seen as too difficult for some players. There doesn't appear to be a difficulty setting, so there's no way to make it easier if you're having a hard time. Each restaurant has an "infinite" number of levels after you complete the story at its location, though, so I presume difficulty ramps up the more levels you play. Further, the line from the Publisher, "all of the fun of the original with none of the grind!" strains credibility. If you try to play through the main story straight without grinding in the infinite modes or claw machines for extra coins and gear for your cooks, you cannot earn enough coins to upgrade your next kitchen fast enough to keep up with customer demands. Each kitchen's upgrades are specific to that kitchen, and each new kitchen's upgrades cost more than the last, but each new kitchen drops your earning back down to baseline when you start. In other words, they expect you to grind for coins in your most recent kitchen before moving to the next one or at the very least have upgraded your cooks' abilities to make up the slack. If you don't, you will eventually be completely unable to progress the story.

So if the gameplay isn't winning any awards, what about the aesthetics? Well, it's a SpongeBob game, so all of the art is bright and colorful. The normal cast of SpongeBob characters are here, but they are all animated like this is an early 2000s internet flash game. The designs are very nearly identical to the show but just enough off that you can tell it wasn't the original artists who made the assets. There is also no voice acting whatsoever in this game; dialog is displayed in a banner at the bottom of the screen during cutscenes. "Cutscenes" is even being generous: a couple characters will be on screen doing stock animations for idling or some emotion while the background is just the inside of the restaurant the player is currently working at. No animations of characters interacting, no custom art for specific scenes, nothing. It's just jarring to have a video game starring one of the single most popular and lucrative animated characters of all time have no real animation and no dialog featuring the show's actual cast of voice actors.

Similarly, the music is forgettable. There are basically only two tracks: one that plays while you're in menus and cutscenes, and one that plays when you're actively playing through a level. Neither of them are so repetitive or obnoxious that they'll get stuck in your head or on your nerves, but you're also not going to be whistling them while you work, either. 7 restaurants, 20+ hours, and you're still going to be hearing the same track while serving a bowl of nails to hardened sailors at the Salty Spitoon that you hear while serving hot dogs at Weenie Hut, Jr.

And then there's the performance. Firstly, the screen jitters and lags on virtually every menu transition. I noted no lagging when playing an actual level, but for a game so minimalistic in what it delivers, Krusty Cook-Off certainly does have its fair share of bugs.
- The game crashed multiple times during multiple different levels.
- Couldn't sell a food item to a customer that wanted said item (exact toppings and everything); customer left angry. Even using the Special Ability that automatically serves all customers didn't give this person his food. This happened repeatedly, and in many instances caused me to lose a level with a "Lose no customers" win condition.
- The "Achievements" icon continued to have a flashing red exclamation point on it after I had claimed all achievement rewards; it did not ever go away, even after restarting the game.
- Unlocked Sandy's hula outfit, but it didn't show up in her wardrobe, so I couldn't equip it.
- Upgrading certain items reduces their selling price instead of raising it.
- Item that I fully upgraded continued to have the "Recommended" label flashing above it.
- Progress bars don't update correctly if you skip the animation.
- Starting from the juice bar level, an invisible patron started placing orders.
- Even the mouse stays permanently on screen rather than disappearing when you're using a controller, a feature that is in almost every modern PC game.
With this many bugs on top of everything else, it leaves this feeling of being an unpolished mess rather than a studio proud of its IP making a fun and engaging experience for its fans.

If your biggest concern is the morality, SpongeBob does little to offend. Mr. Krabbs is the penny-pincher we all know and loathe, willing to overwork and underpay his employees as well as lie to authorities to keep himself out of trouble. Squidward is ever the curmudgeon, willing to lie to SpongeBob to get his way (or get SpongeBob out of his way). Plankton is always lying and scheming to try and steal the Krabby Patty secret formula. And of course, Squidward's awful cooking leads to multiple jokes about backed up toilets and stomach problems. It's everything you'd expect from a typical SpongeBob episode. There's also a joke where Sandy tries to insert a hot dog into a machine, Patrick yells, and SpongeBob informs her that that is not where the hot dog is supposed to go.

Some people may also have moral issues with the "gacha" mechanics that the crane game introduces. However, in this instance I don't think there's actually a big issue here. The claw machine can only be played using tickets that the player earns by satisfying customer orders in a timely fashion during levels. Each new restaurant has its own prize pool for playing there, with each including a few costume pieces for the cooks and bundles of coins. By the time I finished the game, I had gotten all of the costume pieces from each machine and had nearly 100 tickets left over. There is no option to play the claw machine with coins and no option to buy more tickets, but you can buy the costume pieces without playing the claw machine. In other words, the claw machine in the console port of this mobile game boils down to a way to get more money (with the annoying caveat that you'll spend the most mundane minutes of your life watching the unskippable crane animation play every single time as you insert tickets one at a time).

At the end of the day, SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off feels like a cash grab first and a game second. I can't say I didn't have fun playing it. When you're lost in the grind of slinging patties, chaining combos together, and raking in stacks of cash, it's fun. But having that exist in the mobile gamified, half finished, corporate greed end product takes away from the core of what makes the game fun. The type of person I could see getting really into this game would be someone who both one absolutely loves SpongeBob and loves cooking sim games. But if you're that big of a SpongeBob fan that you'd buy Krusty Cook-Off instead of a more widely-renowned, well polished alternative, you're also likely to be disappointed by the lack of original art and voice acting from the show's creators. And if this game is being bought for a younger kid who doesn't care one way or the other about that and just wants a SpongeBob game, then those children would be the ones most frustrated by losing a level over and over for not having perfect combo scores or encountering the same "can't serve this customer" bug each time they try to play. I'm not sure who that leaves in terms of the types of people that aren't put off by everything I've mentioned, but if that somehow described you, then $15 isn't terrible for the experience.

-maestro_dana