SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Pinball Panic Demo

SpongeBob SquarePant 3D Pinball Panic is no longer supported, so it is now impossible to purchase the application. Nonetheless, you can still download it from Softpedia and use it with the limitations listed on this page.

SpongeBob and his friends always seem to get in trouble when they are together, but they also have a way of solving their problems in ingenious ways. The cartoon is still quite popular with the young audience, which is why video games set in Bikini Bottom should attract quite the crowd. On the other hand, they need to uphold at least some kind of quality standards, otherwise they might not be worth the bother.

SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Pinball Panic is a pinball game that tries to provide you with a unique adventure in the underwater paradise known as Bikini Bottom, but it fails to make the said adventure enjoyable. In essence, this is a pinball game in which the characters are the actual balls bouncing around on the table, but the gameplay mechanics are too horrible to make the experience fun.

Although you have the freedom to choose between keyboard or mouse controls, it doesn’t matter which one you go for, because it’s impossible to accurately control the characters. Unlike in a regular pinball game, you do not have to man the paddles, and you do not have an overview of the table either. As such, it’s quite difficult to understand what’s going on, and even more difficult to make a difference and complete the missions.

As if things weren’t bad enough already, you must also deal with the atrocious camera angles, which make it that much more difficult to be aware of your surroundings. Most of the time, your goal is to hit certain targets on the table, so it would be pretty useful to know where these targets are. However, the third-person perspective is fixed, and it doesn’t help much at all when it comes to orientation.

Lastly, the graphics engine is quite primitive too, especially when it comes to the character models and the environments. Everything is blocky and unremarkable, although the bad camera angle forbids you from seeing too much most of the time. The level design is terrible as well, because there’s nothing interesting to see in any of the available levels.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how much you love SpongeBob, because the game at hand makes Bikini Bottom unbearable. Hence, SpongeBob SquarePants 3D Pinball Panic fails to be any fun at all, which means that there are very few reasons to give it a try.