![]() ![]() Sharp turns and steering at moderate to high speeds never feels quite right.When I was young, I played an awful lot of Maxis’ SimAnt, a simulation game that put you in role of a single ant within a colony of black ants in the back yard of a home. Flying in a straight line is the best it can accomplish. It doesn’t help that even in the rare moments Bee Simulator does click, flying is about as awkward as steering a shopping cart with a defective wheel. Seeing the same person 15 times over a five-minute span is enough to take the wonder out of even the most explorative folk. ![]() You’ll often find the same character model duplicated two or three times standing feet away from each other. Honey Park is filled with hundreds of NPC’s, but there are only around eight unique models. If there was an award for the lowest asset variety, Bee Simulator would win 2019 by a landslide. Unfortunately, as with all its mechanics and gameplay challenges, even the act of exploration loses its luster within minutes. Upon completing the story, you’re dropped back into the park with an objective that simply tells you to have fun and explore. It’s in these moments that Bee Simulator shows glimpses of what it could have been an abstract and meditative experience. If VARSAV Game Studios put as much of its resources into polishing the game as they did making sure its audience knows bees flap their wings at 200 beats per second, it might still be worth a recommendation despite its misgivings.īee Simulator is at its best when you’re roaming the park at your leisure, examining every point of interest that catches your eye. After reaching this point of comfort, you’ll curse the people that decided to torture you with three battles in a row constituted interesting game design. After two or three fights, though, you’ll settle into a comfortable rhythm that turns them into mind-numbing annoyances. As the story and these challenges ramp up, you’ll end up fighting up to three enemies in a row.Ĭombat is interesting in the early goings when you’re not quite sure what you’re doing. They try to break up the game’s monotony, though they grow tedious almost immediately. Hard mode battles are much more intense with directional attacks, a special evade, directional blocking, and even an ultimate attack. The player must defend when the cursor highlights the blue bar and attack and when it highlights the red bar. On easy, red and blue bars sit along a meter. The hard mode requires memorizing more moves in succession.įights are either the game’s most passive or mechanically dense distraction depending on the difficulty. ![]() Dances are simple Simon says affairs in which a bee moves up, down, left, or right and the player must repeat the sequence. Bee Simulator differentiates between its easy and hard modes most significantly in its handling of these challenges. As you can guess just by reading that exhaustive list, none of the challenges offer enough to sustain the amount of content present.ĭances and fights are the most interesting of the bunch if only because of how heavily they’re impacted by difficulty. The challenges consist of five repeated challenge types: dances, fights, sting the bully missions, races, and pollen collection. In addition to the main story, Honey Park is littered with dozens of challenges and a few side quests. While this holds true in the final release to some extent, that underlying vision is buried underneath its mediocre story mode and boring challenges. Through this gameplay loop, players supposedly develop a deeper understanding of honey bees. It sold itself as a wondrous journey through a large open-world park with discoveries serving as progress markers. The marketing and press release makes Bee Simulator out as a relaxing game about exploration. They’re the most difficult of the game’s five challenge types spread throughout its open-ended park, though, therein lies the problem. The strict timer applied to pollen collection gamified what should be an otherwise relaxing jaunt. Most of its two-hour run-time consists of two equally uninteresting challenge types: Pollen collection and chase sequences. Corny dialogue delivered by seemingly unprofessional actors further cements the story’s place as anomalous to the core vision. Told through in-game dialogue scenes and 2D cinematics, Bee Simulator‘s “story” exists solely to preach about bees. This forces the colony to search for a new home before theirs is destroyed. The bees are trying to live their lives, but humans start interfering. The simple narrative arc follows the beats you’d expect from a game like this. Players control a newly-born honey bee as she’s tasked with collecting pollen for her colony’s hive. ![]()
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