Genre: Platformer
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Blue Tongue
Release Date: October 23, 2007

Kids love cartoons. Kids love mascots. Kids love playing video games as those mascots. It's no surprise that some of the biggest hits out there feature hordes of these iconic characters either working side by side or against each other to entertain as many youngsters as possible.

This trend has produced some of the all-time best fighting games, including Marvel Vs. Capcom and the various Super Smash Bros. games, but the developers at THQ decided to go a slightly different route than the usual free-for-all fighting game melee. Instead of pitting all of Nickelodeon's stars against one another in a Shonen Jump: Ultimate Stars scenario, they encouraged kids to team up all of these characters to best a common foe in Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots for the DS.

Unfortunately for Nick fans, they also decided that game design from the Super Nintendo era was infallible, and they did away with any modern niceties like "fun" and "varied gameplay." Attack of the Toybotsis a classic side-scrolling beat-'em-up, without so much as two different attack buttons. It's as if the developers just forgot that they had as many as eight buttons to work with, not to mention the d-pad and the limitless possibilities of the touch-screen interface. The result is a title that would have fit in just fine about 10 years ago, but now feels like a radical abuse of about a dozen different cartoon series.

Before true 3-D gameplay reinvented the genre, old-fashioned brawlers were successful because of the frantic action, quick respawning, multiple lives and environmental interaction. Attack of the Toybots manages to incorporate none of these elements. All that's present on that tiny little DS cartridge is a decent-looking but boring and repetitive slice of punching action, which you can occasionally spice up by pressing the Y button to make the characters hop around the screen and damage all foes. All that any character can do on his own is perform a series of attacks (different for every one of the available Nicktoons) and a charge-up attack. They can also jump if need be, but this is really only useful once you've stopped mashing the A button and there are no more enemies to distract you from the ever-so-perilous task of moving directly ahead.

The objective of every level is simple and established right from the outset. Move from point A to point B and smash up every enemy in your way until the game runs out of enemies to throw at you. Once you've reached point B, you engage in a meaningless racing sequence where you're pummeled by boxes, and then wrap up the level with a truly bizarre first-person sequence. It seems like these last two pieces of the level were put there with good intentions and should have broken up the monotony of running up and down boring stages and mashing the A button, but it actually serves to make the experience more excruciating. As soon as you hop in a giant mech halfway through the side-scrolling segment, all individuality a character has is taken away, rendering your choice of Nicktoons completely pointless within the first 10 minutes of each level.

To make matters worse, the walking battle-tanks control like, well … tanks. They're clunky and hard to fight with, making the brawler segments even more unbearable, and during everything else, it feels like you're only controlling half of the vehicle. In all but one of the races, you simply barrel forward at an alarming pace and try to collect bolts without hitting boxes. Hitting boxes not only makes you drop screws, but it also keeps you from picking up new screws for a few seconds, which makes them the bane of your mechanical existence.

Once you've plowed your way through that portion of the level, you're "treated" to the boss battle, which is a curious attempt at simplistic first-person shooting. You must take down the mechanical replica of a Nicktoon with your own inferior machine while avoiding his attacks. You're limited to moving right and left, and shooting a quick shot or a powerful, slow shot. These boss battles go on for far too long and often require you to shoot down obstacles in your way in order to actually hit the toybot directly in front of you, even though his shots can travel straight through them.

In short, just about everything that Attack of the Toybots tries to do turns out to be clumsy and repetitive. Every one of the seven levels feels the same, and every minute lacks variety. However, it does make for a very accessible and light travel game. This game is so mindless that you can effectively play through the final Wily's Fortress-style level while walking down the street and talking on your cell phone. As long as you have two hands available, the game can be played, which is the ultimate test of portability.

The other nice feature left in this title is the ease of two-player cooperative play. Although the gameplay doesn't produce much fun, it lends itself very well to a fun two-person distraction. If the player can keep good company, then this is definitely a game for mindless cooperative beatings. Even the most pointless of exercises is more fun with a friend, but this is really saying much more about the value of cooperative gameplay than it is saying anything about the game itself.

The graphics are perfectly average for a DS game, with the seemingly obligatory 3-D backgrounds and objects handled decently. The sprites for the characters look pretty sharp, and they are blended well with the 3-D elements to make it a pretty seamless transition when things go from two dimensions to three. Unfortunately, the rather mute and pointless audio doesn't reach the bar set by the graphics, and falls into pure mediocrity like the rest of the game. The script is at an even lower level than this and sinks firmly into the pit of awful. The concept of the game was astoundingly simple, even for a kid's show, and the dialogue is wooden and lacks any real immersion. Tak says "Juju" a lot, and Jimmy Neutron spouts scientific gibberish, but it doesn't sound like the right kind of gibberish, and everyone's speech falls completely flat.

In the end, Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots is a game with a decent concept that got bogged down by limited execution and what feels like a lack of interest on the part of the developers. The story is bad even by the standards of children's cartoons, and the gameplay isn't a whole lot better, consisting mostly of the endless mashing of one button. It's probably a game to avoid, unless you're willing to shell out a few bucks for something completely mindless to distract you on the go.

Score: 5.5/10