Is Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny any good?

Nicktoons & The Dice of Destiny is the latest Nicktoons games from Fair Play Labs and GameMill Entertainment, the makers of Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl. This time the game takes on more of an adventure game/fantasy RPG aesthetic. But is it any good? And why does everything cost so much gosh dang money? Let’s get into it.

So the setup for this game is that Timmy Turner makes a wish to be in a legally distinct, Dungeons and Dragons type adventure, and in Fairly OddParents fashion, he gets more than he bargained for... A "be careful what you wish for" misadventure ensues, and we all go home learning a lesson about honesty, or some such nonsense. So all your favourite Nicktoons from the early 2000s and also the Rugrats and the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles get sucked into a magical world based on not DnD. You’ve gotta get all The Dice of Destiny because whoever has them all, has them all! But uh oh! The bad guy girl-bosses from each franchise have teamed up, Azula, Ember and Angelica. Yes, the genocidal fire-lord/princess, a teen-idol ghost with powerful mind control abilities, and a three year old girl. The most deadly of all the Nickelodeon multiverse. I guess it makes sense if you think of this world as a land of imagination, but that might be a bit of a stretch.

I think it's a little weird that the Rugrats are here at all since they are more of a 90s thing than an early 2000s thing. If they wanted to be accurate to the era, they should’ve gone with Rugrats All Grown-up, the teenage iteration of the characters where they go to high school and skateboard. The 2012 TMNTs are also here, which is interesting because they’re like at least 2 versions of the Turtles outdated now. And again, from the 2010s, so a little bit after the Nick era that everyone else is from. Oh yeah, and only Leonardo is playable, even though the other Turtles are there. One of many clues that this game was made in a hurry. I guess it's nice that they’re all here, but frustrating that you can talk to them but they don't do anything. Same with Team Avatar, only Katara is playable, even though Sokka is hanging around. Later on you meet Aang and Zuko, but they ain’t playable, and do not help you out. At least when Battle for Volcano Island did this, there were characters just hanging out who weren’t fighters or adventurers, like Squidward or Tucker. So you didn't mind that they weren't playable.

I do appreciate that the game acknowledes that these Turtles already did a DnD themed episode, and they’re even dressed in the same attire. This is similar flavour across the board, all the characters are transformed into a medieval/fantasy RPG archetype. So Spongebob is dressed like a knight, cause remember that one medieval times episode? Sandy is a barbarian because remember that one Dirty Dan episode? Danny Phantom is a rogue, which does fit his powers, and he is dressed similarly to when he was a samurai for like five seconds in the episode Infinite Realms, so it could be a reference to that? And the rest of the characters are just kind of... whatever. It is nice to have the original four boys back, Timmy, Jimmy, Danny and Spongebob. And they kind of acknowledge that maybe the earlier Nicktoons games happened. But it’s just a couple lines of dialogue that acts as “fan service,” but doesn’t really affect anything.

Almost the entire original voice cast for all these different characters reprise their roles, with the exception of Avatar characters. Some of which is fair, Zach Tyler is an adult now and no longer sounds like Aang. And the sound a-likes for Zuko and Azula are quite good. But it also doesn’t make that much sense when you realize that Grey DeLisle is in the game already voicing Vicky, so why not just get her to reprise her role as Azula as well? They do seem to be voiced by people of colour which I guess is good for representation or whatever, but still strange to me since almost everyone from ATLA is still working in the industry. You’re telling me you were able to get Sean Astin to be Raphael but none of the Avatar cast were available? Including Grey DeLisle who is in the game? Weird. Though, it is kinda cool that we are getting new voice lines by David Kaufman as Danny Phantom in 2025.

The gameplay is pretty simple. It is very reminiscent of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy, a PS2 era favourite of mine. The levels are pretty straight forward, you fight a bunch of enemies and get to the end. Each character does play fairly differently. Jimmy is all about summoning, or inventing, different defence towers, so he’s good at crowd control. Katara is a healer, etc. Danny is cast as a rogue, which fits pretty well. He can do the shadow-clone jitsu, or turn invisible to sneak past enemies. The game does have coop, and I imagine it’s more to fun play with friends, but you can say that about most games. The gameplay is fine. It’s a perfectly acceptable game to have on in the background while listening to a podcast. If you’re playing Dice of Destiny, it’s probably not because you’re looking for gameplay that’s particularly challenging or even interesting. It’s because you like the characters.

That being said, the game feels extremely rough. The levels themselves have a lot of repeated content within each world. There’s just a general clunkiness to a lot of the ways the characters move through the world. Multiple times I got stuck on the geomatry of the level and had to restart. One time as Jimmy, I completely clipped out of bounds and could not get back to the main part of the level. The game occasionally unequipped my current weapon at the start of a level, which left me wondering why I wasn’t doing any damage. Weird stuff like that just kept happening to me. The whole game just feels extremely rushed and unpolished. And like, it’s 2025, we should be expecting more. For $60, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a certain level of basic quality assurance. I wasn’t trying to break the game, it just kept happening.

I do want to clarify something that I think people sometimes forget, or aren’t aware of; The game was developed by Fair Labs and published by GameMill Entertainment. The developers are the ones who actually make the game, like code it and everything, whereas the publishers are more like the producers. They provide funding and are behind marketing and distribution. Whenever there’s a dumb corporate decision that ends up hurting a game, it usually comes from the publishing end, and not the devs, who just want to make a cool game. Developers are often called "lazy" but I don't think that's usually the case. More likely, the publishers are just being greedy. And that feels like the case here.

There’s a lot of fun references to the various shows and characters represented. Each character has moves and abilities directly from their respective show. The dialogue will often call back to specific events or episodes. You can feel that there is passion creeping in from the devs, but everything is just so undercooked.

Here's a question: Who is this game for? Almost all the characters are directly from the early 2000s era of Nickelodeon, unlike the All-Star Brawl games that took a broader approach. So maybe it’s specifically targeting my generation, aiming for nostalgia. But the game has this obnoxiously cutesy art style that looks like it’s for babies. But babies don’t know who half these characters even are. It’s very Danny Phantom heavy, which I appreciate, and makes me think the game is for me. But I’m an adult, I’ve played other games. I’ve played real games, that are finished. I’m just not impressed just because I see things that I recognize.

Man, I could be playing Ghost of Yotei right now.

Here’s where I risk becoming an old man yelling at clouds; but back in my day, games were way better. Well, moreso the early 2000s was a golden age of licensed games. Yes, there was a ton of slop, and shovelware. But the overall time needed to make a game was so much shorter, that often times what AAA studios were making, didn’t feel that different from the licensed games that companies like THQ were putting out. There were some stinkers for sure, but there was so much stuff coming out that just statistically, some of them had to be good. Spider-Man 2 was great, and the swinging still holds up today. Over the Hedge was a hidden gem and a personal favourite of mine. Star Wars had 4 games in 2005 alone, which range from pretty good, like Republic Commando to all time classics like Battlefront II and Lego Star Wars. You had weird scenarios like X-Men Origins: Wolverine, where the devs were already working on a Wolverine game, and then got the licence to tie it into the movie, so there was actually more time spent on the game than on the movie. (Which is part of why the movie is balls, but the game slaps.) Hell, Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom was so good that it got a full remake like a year ago. And I think Volcano Island, both the console and GBA versions, are pretty solid platformers. The other thing you had in this era that was truly peak, was video rental places like BlockBuster, most of which you could also rent games from. Absolutely GOATed. You could rent a game with Spongebob on the cover and either, finish it in a week, or if it sucked, you could still have some fun with it for a sleepover, and then return it without any guilt of wasting your money or time. And when you did find the occasional gem, you could save up your allowance or wait for Christmas to add it to your collection. There was a lot of crap, sure, but it didn’t seem that bad because the risk wasn’t that high. Also, I was a kid and stupid, so it was easier to fool me with subpar games. I’m 28 now. I can’t spend $60 on a Spongebob game that was slapped together in a few weeks. Not when there are so many other high quality games so readily available.

Let’s talk about prices(CAD) for a second. Right now you can get Hades II for $40, Silksong for $25, the original Hollow Knight for $16. If you want something comparable, Expedition 33 is like $65 and that’s a full-ass AAA quality RPG that’s supposed to be incredible. I just can’t think of a reason to buy this game outside of making content out of it for a Danny Phantom-themed month of YouTube videos. Pricing can be subjective, and everyone has a different financial situation. But if you’re charging this much, you got to a least make a game that works consistently. Also, there’s a DLC for Dice of Destiny that costs $20, that is literally just a costume pack. From the description, it sounds like it is just one alternate costume per character. This is one of the most egregious things I’ve ever seen. They used to just have alternate costumes be an unlockable in games, remember that? That would be a decent in-game reward to encourage me to keep playing... but no. Let’s charge the price of Hollow Knight, a full ass game, for the ability to make Spongebob look slightly different.

[Spoilers] At the end of the game, Vicky is revealed to be the secret final boss, pulling the strings behind the other girl-boss villains. Makes sense, as Vicky is one of the main antagonists of Fairly OddParents, and this game has been relatively Timmy focussed. She turns into a dragon and you gotta fight her. Once again, I accidentally clipped out of bounds and completely cheesed this boss fight. A perfect end to an imperfect game. This made the fight feel pretty underwhelming, but I was happy to be done with the game. At the end, they use the Dice of Destiny to send everyone home and also erase their memories. Some of the characters protest, but I did enjoy that Danny’s like, "Nah, its chill. I erase people’s memories and reset the timeline all the time." And that’s basically it, we barely acknowledge that the main Nicktoons boys may have met before, but if they did, they don’t remember it because of magic or whatever.

Despite this game featuring many characters that I really like and grew up with, and seeing the rare moments of character and personality that the devs clearly want to give to this game, but just clearly don’t have the resources to deliver something even subpar... I just don’t feel good about supporting this game. It’s not a huge cost or anything, I’m making content out of it, and now that I’m done with it I’ll probably trade it in for something else. But I’m just, severely underwhelmed by this whole thing. It feels, a bit yucky. A sloppy cash-grab baiting my generation with nostalgia and hoping I won’t notice an unfinished mid experience for babies. Everything is crazy expensive right now, especially in gaming, but even so, there are just so many better ways to spend your money. There’s been three of these games in the last few years from this team and, for me at least, I think this is going to be the last one I buy. I don’t think I can recommend this game in good conscience, not when there are just so many other superior ways to spend your money and time. But by all means, if you see this game on sale somewhere or at the library, feel free to check it out. But please don’t spend full price on this one, it’s just not worth it.