Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation S.O.D.A - Charm For Days

29/04/25

The early to mid 2000s era of Cartoon Network is probably the era I have the most nostalgia for; Ed, Edd and Eddy, Ben 10, Justice League Unlimited, Samurai Jack… it was a really special time for cartoons, and whilst I don’t think Codename: Kids Next Door was the most ambitious or mature of this time… man, I don’t think I ever missed a new episode premiere back then, much to my dad’s chagrin. Hell, I remember being mildly obsessed with the extended TV movie, Operation Z.E.R.O! When I found that it had a GBA game (like every other Cartoon Network show of the era), I approached it with some trepidation, expecting something that was totally an afterthought, nothing more than a stocking stuffer for Little Timmy at Christmas. I’m not going to say Codename Kids Next Door: Operation SODA is particularly amazing - in fact, despite its more notable elements it’s still quite mediocre - it’s clear that the developers understood what they were adapting, saving this franchise’s handheld escapade from true negativity.

I also, once again, have to shout out Vicarious Visions, the developer of Operation SODA. If there has been any constant to the Game Boy Abyss, it’s been generic, mediocre, frequently awful 2D platformers. Vicarious Visions, at least when it comes to licensed adaptations of series like Kids Next Door, doesn’t turn them into five star classics or anything remotely of the sort, but they create games that have at least solid-enough foundations that I don’t dread the entire experience throughout. It would be very, very easy to put out some pure - as much as I hate the word - slop, but this is a game that does have some decent thought and ideas behind it - not to mention some real love for the series as a whole.

The game is essentially an extended episode of the show; in the strange, Kids v Adults world presented in the show, the infamous Dr. Fizz has raised the age people are allowed to drink Soda, causing the Kids Next Door to become bootleggers for fizzy drinks like a modern day adaptation of Boardwalk Empire. The story really amounts to just a handful of text boxes here and there, nothing more than you’d expect from a throwaway adaptation like this, but you really don’t need more than that for context for this weirdness. If there’s one thing I’d like to praise overall about this game, it’s the fact they totally managed to capture the weird, over-the-top aesthetics and vibe Kids Next Door had; the thrown-together technology of the kids, locked in battle with the over-the-top, scientific might of the adults. Vicarious Visions knows their material, and it translates - at least visually - wonderfully. I’m not super sure if Operation SODA is an adaptation of specific episodes or anything, but the fact there is an entire segment where you are saving children who have been kidnapped by soda-hating adults, and hooked up to bonafide fucking milking machines to repurpose the soda the children unlawfully drank is completely insane and completely par for the course for the franchise as a whole. Man, I miss this show.

Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation S.O.D.A’s main foundation is that of the bog-standard endemic to the Game Boy Advance: A 2D action platformer, but rather than just having the same gameplay basics presented over and over again, the game actually has a decent amount of variety throughout it’s three-odd hour playtime. Each mission will present you with utilizing a different member of the core Kids Next Door team, and thus each character presents an at least somewhat different kind of gameplay from his or her teammates. The game gives you an at least lip-service amount of non-linearity by frequently allowing you to select the order in which you do certain sets of levels. It’s nothing in the grand scheme of things, but giving a bit of agency to the player in how they approach a title is never a bad thing in my opinion.

But as I said, whilst there are distinct similarities in how each character, and thus the game overall, plays, there is at least some level of uniqueness to each of the five members of the Kids Next Door. Numbuh One and Numbuh Two are the most similar in level structure; rather than being boots on the ground, these two fly through their levels, dodging, weaving, and blasting through threats and dangers. Their levels are probably the easiest, being gauntlets of dodging through waves of enemies and physical threats, navigating simple mazes, and hitting the end goal. Numbuhs Three and Five are again relatively similar, slinging projectile weapons and moving through levels in a more horizontal, linear fashion. Despite that basic similarity, No. 3’s levels are more platformy in design, with her moveset sending her bouncing and gliding above and around foes and obstacles. Conversely, No. 5 feels almost stealth-like and puzzle-y in nature, with her weapons frequently stunning, not KO-ing enemies, and a lot of block pushing puzzles to boot. Finally, whilst Numbuh Four’s has the platforming structure of No. 3 and 5, it takes a notably more beat’em up approach to his combat encounters, with far more melee strikes coming from both himself, and his foes. Each of these game modes, in isolation, wouldn’t be particularly fun in a full game, but by divvying up these playstyles across the various members of the Kids Next Door, it does a lot to break up what would be a lot of monotonous, samey levels, and thankfully, with each level only taking five to ten minutes to clear, you’ll constantly be bouncing around from one character to another.

Whilst the variety Operation SODA presents is pretty fun, after the first set of five missions where you play across the entire suite of Kids Next Door characters, there’s never really another element that really switches the game up further, and you’re really just doing iterative versions of the same things over and over again. It’s never really that bad - usually, that is - but once I realized the game wasn’t really going to change anything up, even with the upgrades you earn across the game for each character. In each set of levels, each of the members of Kids Next Door will find an item that’ll upgrade their movesets incrementally - such as giving No. 3 a super jump and a glide, or additional power behind No. 1 laser gun. It adds a nice little bit of power progression to the game, but outside of perhaps No. 3’s platforming upgrades, doesn’t feel like it inherently changes how the game plays at its mediocre foundations. Like I said, you’ll be doing the same things again and again - flying through mazes as No. 1 and 2, platforming as No. 3 and 5, and brawling as No 4.

The biggest issue I had with the game beyond the general repetition Operation SODA quickly falls into is just how imprecise the movement and platforming is, making the game just feel foundationally bad to play. Whilst it’s not too much of an issue in No. 1 and 2’s freeform flying stages, there were a lot of moments in the other, more traditional platforming stages where I made mistakes ranging from having to repeat basic jumps to death-inducing because the characters twitched too far in one direction despite me barely hitting the button. So many deaths, as impotent death is in this game, come from these imprecise platforming, and this extends to the combat; many enemies have giant hitboxes around their sprite, making certain characters (*cough*No. 4*cough*) feel way worse to engage with foes than others.

Once you get past the imprecise controls, Operation SODA, being a fairly easy title just due to how the building blocks of the game works, doesn’t really have many ways to increase difficulty as the game wears on, thus resulting in a handful of stages that are just more annoying than challenging. There was a section with No. 3 where you had to platform across tiny platforms whilst avoiding being crushed by boxes, but also using said boxes as platforming blocks - I died probably ten times on this section? Similarly, No. 1 had a moment where you had to weave up a pipe-like structure after a block falls from the ceiling, making sure to come out the top before the next block falls down the pipeline and crushes No. 1. Again, it’s not super hard, but it requires an element of precision and timing Operation SODA just doesn’t have at a baseline. In the grand scheme of things, these aren’t atrocious, game-blackening issues, but with how mediocre Operation SODA is at the best of times, this doesn’t help make the game stand out in my head for any good reason.

The main collectible throughout each stage are bottle caps which are essentially just traditional coins from a Mario game; collect 50 of them (which, coincidentally, is also the amount most stages have (except one stage only had 49!? What the hell is going on there?)) and you’ll get an extra life, which is nice, but it’s so easy to get all the caps in the majority of levels you’ll rapidly accumulate enough lives running out isn’t remotely a danger - and even if you did, as I did once (and that was only because I reloaded in with only the basic stock of three), you only go back to the start of the set of levels you’re in, so it’s really not too big a deal. Beyond just the accumulation of lives, if you manage to collect every bottle cap in the game (earning a Golden Rainbow Monkey Trophy at the end of each level in the process), you’ll gain access to a ‘sooper’ secret password that allows you to use the character’s entire skillset from the end of the game from the start. Conceptually fun, but if you’ve already done everything in the game, what’s really the point of having access to everything from the start? Ultimately, I collected them just because that’s what my primordial lizard brain wants, but outside of stocking up on lives for the last couple, more brutal and frustrating, stages

This is the perfect time to segue into everyone’s favourite segment of these reviews; the password system! After every single substage, the game will throw you a password This game came out in November 2004 - three weeks before the release of the goddamn Nintendo DS! Why were games shipping without the ability to traditionally save in TWO THOUSAND AND FOUR!? Insanity, utter, utter insanity. One day I’ll stop complaining about this, but today? Nay, nay.

The graphics are pretty rough, especially for a later-era GBA game, but like I said, it does a great job of conveying the kid-verse weirdness that’s the core of the Kids Next Door experience. Like a bunch of other Vicarious Visions games, despite the characters being 2D sprites, they have that pseudo-3D look that’s pretty nice, but it’s the only real standout in the rather low-fi looking game. I dunno, it looks exactly like I’d expect a 2D cartoon platformer looks, it’s not awful, but there’s not much to say. There For the game’s soundtrack, there is genuinely nothing to speak of - the very few songs present are perfectly fine, but there are only a handful and I eventually just tuned them out entirely from their sameness.. In any case, they don’t have any of the bombastic, spy-like tunes that helped cement the weirdness of the Kids Next Door cartoon setting as a whole.

Outside of a handful of late-game levels, I don’t think Codename Kids Next Door: Operation SODA is a particularly bad game, mostly due to the decent enough variety of playstyles present throughout it’s three hour campaign. Its adherence to adapting and showcasing the key elements of the setting is admirable, but the fact is even with a decent amount of variety, the core, foundational gameplay doesn’t really carry it through to the end. I could imagine myself as a kid adoring this game - and struggling with more than I did here - but it’s otherwise a very mediocre and afterthought of a game that I have very little insightful or poignant to say. Again, shoutout to Vicarious Visions, as I feel many other developers would have produced something that tilts very much to the side of ‘bad’ shovelware, and whilst I wouldn’t say Operation SODA particularly leans towards the good side of the balance, it’s made with enough love and respect I can’t help but look back on it with some fondness.

Thanks for reading my review of Codename: Kids Next Door: Operation SODA! Been a little slow on the reviews because me and my fiance adopted two kittens who, despite being the cutest things in the world, are completely mad and have me at their every beck and call. As always, you can find me over on BlueSky and on Twitch under GameBoyAbyss, or you can email me at either mgeorge7003@hotmail.com or cckaiju@gmail.com if you have any questions or requests! Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!