The creature designs of the bees and the foes you go up against are detailed and genuinely impressive. Vibrant colours bring the park to life, with luscious flowers and greenery making the world a real joy to spend time in. For all the complaints about average gameplay and the weak narrative, Bee Simulator at least looks brilliant. It’s here that the best part of Bee Simulator becomes evident. When you’re out in the open world it’s a little different as you can finally see what is going on in the world. ![]() Navigating the hive is a maze of madness, with pitch black tunnels that make traversal confusing and tedious, meaning you’ll often get lost. It’s off-putting and adds to the some of the initial confusion that comes with layout of the hive. Once a task is complete, the game will abruptly cut to an animation or another part of the level. It never properly feels like you’re grooving or communicating, more just following basic button prompts. Dancing is fairly straight forward, where you mimic the actions of another bee. If you happen to lean a little too hard on one direction, you’ll be thrown widely off course and if you miss one of the hoops you have to fly through, you’ll be chucked back to the beginning of the race. There’s an attempt to copy flight simulator mechanics here, making the flying and racing games more complex than they need to be. This isn’t helped by the finnicky control system. Battles are poorly explained and become a chore. These tasks are all completed through some fiddly minigames. Now, bees do communicate via dancing, so that is partly correct, and they sure do defend their hives from predators, so I guess there’s another half tick there, but as I live in Australia, I cannot verify that bees assist squirrels with finding their parents, so we’ll chalk that up as being questionable. Sure, you do ‘bee’ things like collect pollen and eat sweet food for nourishment, but then you’re also tasked with battling wasps and hornets, helping lost squirrels, and taking place in dance battles. Now, it certainly would make for a fairly devastating game if every time you stung someone you die, so I can appreciate why they’d change that part of bee life.īut in a bid to flesh out the game and add variety to the rather short narrative, the creative liberties reach eye brow raising levels. Secondly, when a honey bee stings someone or something, they die. First up, a worker bee will always be a worker bee, they don’t have to prove themselves as worthy bees to become protectors of the hive – they already do that. As soon as I realised this, I was able to put aside my minor frustrations about the creative liberties that the developers have taken with the lives of bees. ![]() Here, your avatar is a little bee named ‘Beescuit’ (you can happily change it to anything else, but ‘Beescuit’ seemed sweet enough for me), and they’re given the task of learning how to move up the bee ranks and become a better bee.įirst and foremost, Bee Simulator is most certainly a family friendly game, and with that in mind, it’s a perfect game for kids to play with. This is less a simulation and more a glorified action game with racing, battles, and dancing blended into one, where useful information about bees is presented on the loading screens. I respect what Bee Simulator is partially attempting to do by educating players about the world of bees (the opening animated sequence covers in detail the importance of bees and the difficulties they face around the world), but the gameplay fails to reinforce that key message. ![]() While Bee Simulator isn’t as egregious with the ‘simulator’ label as Goat Simulator or Surgeon Simulator are, it’s still a stretch to call this a ‘simulator’ game. Well, if you’re developers Varsav Game Studios, you don’t. How do you gamify nature? How do you make the threats facing bees around the world into an enjoyable game? With that in mind, I’m not entirely sure what I’d expected going into this ‘simulator’ game. ![]() I had high hopes that this would be an in-depth game that puts you in the wings of a bee and lets you experience life as one of Earths most vital creatures, flying around the world, collecting pollen, helping keep trees alive by means of cross pollination. I only have myself to blame for getting so hyped up for a game called Bee Simulator.
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