A Nickelodeon dungeons and dragons style mash up sounds very good on paper, drawing on characters from across their many different IP to take up various roles from a tabletop fantasy RPG. That’s what Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny does that well, as Timmy from Fairly Oddparents transforms into a wizard and SpongeBob becomes a knight, but outside of the cartoon mashup, this is quite a basic game.
In Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny, Timmy wishes to be transported into the world of one of his favourite games. However, the wish goes wrong and pulls in characters from other shows, as well as dungeons based upon various Nickelodeon shows such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, and enemies inspired by the shows to boot. Battling through the world renders this as an isometric action RPG, and while you’re probably not expecting genre-beating graphics, what’s odd is that character models look desaturated. Katara looks deathly pale and far from her normal skin tone. This desaturations is mostly noticeable on characters with the levels themselves looking better with more vibrant colours.
Between levels you end up in a hub called The Tangle, filled with shops and side missions. It is also here where you can switch between characters to try out which playstyle is best for you. As mentioned, Timmy is a wizard with range attacks, while SpongeBob is a knight so gets closer in. Other characters fall into the rogue, barbarian and healer roles, which works for multiplayer. In single player, picking one character is better after a little experimentation. I ended up sticking with Timmy due to his range and ability to target multiple enemies.
Each character has special abilities to use too to deal with more powerful enemies and groups of them, but the majority of the time you will be using the same basic attacks which can get repetitive, even if you do switch characters. The game throws weapons, armour, talismans, and consumables at you, so there is always better gear. These can be found in chests, from completing challenges, buying them from the shop, and defeating bosses.
Levels themselves are pretty linear though a few do have some winding paths and one has you working out which portals to use to move forward. These variations are far between, with the majority of levels looking fine and different across worlds, but being samey in playstyle makes things a bit uninteresting. You can tell effort has gone into crafting levels that use the Nickelodeon shows as inspiration, but more could be done.
Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny’s story is fine and does draw on humour from the various shows it uses, but do not expect anything with depth. This is definitely aimed at a younger audience, so things are easy to follow. It is all voice acted and it is decent, though it could be stronger. There are some performance issues present in the game too, playing the Switch 1 version of the game on Switch 2. Some cutscenes just glitched with frames jumping back and forth, overlaying on each other in a way that hurt to watch. There were also a few times where characters would get stuck while moving around levels.
