Game of the Week: October 26th 2025
Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (NDS, 2007)
Developer: Natsume Publisher: THQ
With Nicktoons like these, who needs Toybots?
Up until now, I had never played any version of Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots, or any Nicktoons Unite title besides Globs of Doom growing up. While researching this game, I'd seen many people say that this was their favorite childhood game, or that this was a good DS game in general. As a result, I had very high hopes going in.
I am very, very disappointed going out.
The first thing I noticed when I began playing was how slow the playable characters moved. I just about pressed every button on my 3DS trying to see if there was a way to make them move any faster. Then there was the method of attack, Each character has one basic attack, either ranged (Spongebob, Mr. Pilk) or melee (Danny Fenton, Tak) they use by pressing B. Pressing B in rapid succession results in a slightly different attack. (They throw 3 projectiles instead of 1.)
You can also attack in midair and hold down B for a "stronger" attack that barely does anything. That's it. Unless I'm missing something, all you do is mash the B button until the enemies go way, and you can't even make them go away in a cool or satisfying way. There's also a co-op attack you can execute by pressing X once the meter fills up. I used it to clear large swaths of enemies.
Getting through the "Action Areas" were a chore and the stupid puzzles inside were one of the reasons I chose to drop the game. In the Retroville stage, there's this puzzle were you have to sort 3 balls of the same color into a color-coded gate before it opens. If you fuck up even once, it resets to 0. Not just on that gate, but on all gates. I was stuck on the second puzzle of the stage for 10 minutes just screaming at my console because I accidentally pressed the lever too late (or the lever didn't respond at all to my input) and let a green ball into the blue gate, resetting all my progress. The fact that there were three of these goddamn things in the stage is proof that there is no loving god.
After a boss fight, made slightly harder by the fact the CPU spends half of the time standing around allowing themselves/you to get attacked instead of helping. You unlock the mech suit that you will use for the rest of the stage. I like the mech suit segments. Toybots go down in 1~2 hits. But the downsides to the Mech Suit are that you only have one basic ranged attack. Against large swarms of enemies, the laser attack is like trying to kill a bunch of pissed off wasps with a fly swatter. The final boss of each Action Area is a machine/gate thing that constantly spawns enemies and shoots lasers. I found myself getting kicked off my mech a lot because my CPU partner would just stand around instead of picking off the enemies that surrounded me, like WTF? HELP ME!
After that nightmare, and a admittedly cool cutscene of the Mech Suit transforming into vehicle mode; there's a "Ride Area": a driving segment with what might be the worst vehicle controls I've ever had to deal with in a video game. You can get little images of other Nicktoons in this mode. Those can be viewed in the Gallery. I found out you can unlock GIR from Invader Zim if you get them all, but that would require playing the Ride Areas over and over again to get all of the images, most of which are hidden in one of the random boxes scattered all over the track, so I didn't bother with going for the 100%.
Then there is the "Boss Area", a battle against a giant Toybot modeled after one of the playable characters. In the Retroville Boss Area, there's a bunch of unavoidable projectiles flying everywhere, causing you to constantly lose health. I had to retry this stage like 3 times before I was able to clear it.
The puzzle in Amity Park alongside the repetitve combat and snail's pace movement that had been tormenting me my entire playthrough was what made me drop AotTB entirely. There was this box of purple stuff on a conveyor belt that I had to use a magnet to pick up. The thing with this puzzle is that you had two buttons to control the magnet, a left and down button. I really did sit down and try to solve this puzzle, but I never managed to pick up the cube. After seeing the slow ass magnet miss the cube by a mile god knows how many times, I decided I wasn't going to waste any more time on this game and dropped it on the spot.
Final Verdict:
Nicktoons Unite: Attack of the Toybots for NDS is a slow, cumbersome experience that left me frustrated after all was said and done. Writing this review was more fun than playing this game.
