SpongeBob Moves In

City building games are as popular as they are entertaining. In SpongeBob Moves In, fans can have their own chance to build an underwater city of their own. This game for iOS features everything you need to get started, and the cartoon characters both kids and their parents love.

The game uses touch screens to let you navigate the world, placing buildings and interacting with residents. Residents must be fed and happy in order to continue, and certain missions also have to be completed in order to move forward.

Shop Items Add Up

SpongeBob Moves In costs $3.99 to play—and that’s not all you’ll be spending to enjoy the game. On top of this starting cost, they have an extensive number of items you can buy in the shop. One of the most important items in this section is jelly, which helps speed things in the game up. Without these jelly’s, playing the game can be interminably slow. While you don’t “have to” buy the jelly to play the game, the slowness of it without purchasing anything can put you off the game entirely.

This in itself isn’t a problem, but the game doesn’t add much to the city-building genre. There are plenty of similar, free to play games out there, that aren’t asking you to drop tons of cash at their shop in order to do so. SimCity Societies for example, is free to play and offers much more than SpongeBob Moves In could ever hope to, shop and all.

Clunky play and storyline

The whole feel of the game is unpolished. The game starts with SpongeBob being dropped off at Bikini Bottom, population 8. At the time there is nothing but a few, sad, gray colored fish walking around in the city. The tutorial has you build SpongeBob’s iconic Pineapple house, get a job making Krabby Patties, and start to work building Bikini Bottom.

The game does allow you to build and decorate it as your finances, in the form of coins, allows. You can get more coins by growing tomatoes, onions, and lettuce, frying a patty of some sort of meat, and feeding it to hungry fish. The fish will reward you with coins, or sometimes recipes and other progression items as well. You can then use these items to build buildings or decorate Bikini Bottom.

The storyline of this is fairly flat, with jokes that you don’t laugh at and dialogue that is stilted at best. While it does work as a city-building game, there is nothing at all new or innovative about it.

Pros:

• Features SpongeBob

Cons:

• Shop items required for faster gameplay
• Poor story
• Clunky gameplay