Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots

Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (NAOTT) is an adventure title aimed fairly and squarely at the younger end of the gaming market. Featuring lots of familiar characters - Jimmy Neutron, SpongeBob, Danny Phantom and Tak are just some of who and what are on offer - NAOTT takes the player into a world where the Nicktoon characters are quite possibly not what they seem. There's a mad professor on the loose with some strange and devious plans for our colourful friends.

The professor's evil plan is to make robot copies of all the Nicktoons heroes. To do this, he first abducts and scans each of the heroes to create a template called the Master Model. Then he sends the real heroes home, none the wiser! When they discover the professor's sinister plan, they have to collect all of the Master Models before the professor can use them to build an army of robotic minions.

Your job as the player in NAOTT is to guide different heroes at different times through a selection of zones in order to recover their own templates. Of course, there are lots of novel moves and power-ups to execute and collect along the way, and different characters can do different things. SpongeBob can tongue-steer and tongue-slide, for example, whereas Danny Phantom cannot. Mr SquarePants can't fly like a Ghost Boy: Danny can. Suffice to say, you'll need to call upon everyone in the game and their respective talents at different points.

NAOTT is a real hoot. Professor Calamitous is an inspired creation indeed - a complete nutcase! SpongeBob is the biggest draw here, for young and old alike, but the variation of playable characters, stun bunnies, plenty of goo, a virtual diary room(!) and a two-player co-op mode that includes a mechsuit fighting feature is more than enough to keep a youngster happy. Maybe some oldsters too...