Review | Naughty Bear

You are an evil teddy bear that kills other teddy bears. With a concept so drenched in cuteness and violence, Naughty Bear had the potential to be video gaming gold. You are Naughty Bear, and when you’re not invited to a birthday party you do the sensible thing and spin into a tremendous rage, torturing, terrifying and brutally murdering all the teddies you can find. Unfortunately the real victim is you, the person who paid good money for this awful game.

Naughty Bear contains exactly one joke, and I just spoiled it. You run around an island full of colourful, fluffy bears, scoring points for killing them, or scaring them, or scaring them and then killing them. Getting points means you unlock the gateways and bridges to new areas where you can get points for scaring and killing bears. The game takes you through seven episodes generally split into three areas, each with its own paper-thin reason for Naughty to get angry and take up arms. Sadly, all of the episodes play out exactly the same way and all of the maps are either a series of cabins in a forest area or a forest with some cabins in it.

There are plenty of weapons at your disposal with which to torment your tormentors. Machetes, baseball bats, tree branches, axes and the like are scattered around the map, as well as a selection of firearms. If fear is your weapon of choice, Naughty can hit the scare button at any point to terrify nearby bears. Bears who get scared enough will go insane, and one more big jolt will send them so mad they literally kill themselves. Watching a teddy bear gut himself with a sword is a uniquely disturbing experience. Combat is limited to just one strike button which you can mindlessly hit until a bear goes down. If you wound them they will hobble around and give you the chance to do an ultra-kill or scare, the former resulting in a different animation depending on the weapon you have. These are fun the first time you see them, but not the tenth time.

The game tries to trick you into thinking there is a stealth component, teasing the prospect of setting up elaborate traps and sabotage schemes, allowing you to put down (wait for it) bear traps, and break vital town equipment to lure unsuspecting bears out into the open so you can do your thing. In reality, the gameplay is far too broken for this to work. Unless you are completely hidden in the trees there is no way to tell if a bear can see you until they scream and run for the alarms or the exit. The terrible, hyperactive camera and total lack of any sort of lock-on system makes it impossible to quietly track down and eliminate bears, so what could have been a Splinter Cell-style silent take down quickly devolves into chasing after your prey blindly smacking them in the head until they fall down. In fact, all the levels eventually boil down to running around hitting the punch button until you win.

New episodes are unlocked by gaining bronze, silver and gold trophies, which you get by gaining high scores in preceding levels. For the average player this will mean doing the levels over and over again to amass more points, making the game feel tired even after a couple of hours. The constant ticking down of the combo meter will force you to stop the mildly interesting task of stalking bears to occasionally break a window or throw something in a fire. For the points, of course.

Style was where this game had the chance to shine, and it fails miserably. The graphics look okay but not amazing, with a big pile of clipping issues that particularly crop up in the killing animations. As mentioned, the game occurs almost exclusively in a set of boring wood cabins surrounded by boring green trees. Objects are reused early and often, making it hard to tell what level you are even playing. Weapons have no weight to them – hitting a bear with a bat feels like swinging through nothing – and overall everything feels a lot less solid than it should. The HUD looks basic and a little cheap, as if they slapped it on near the end as an afterthought. The sound is inoffensive, apart from when the cheesy British narrator (doing a lousy Eric Idle impression) pipes up to deliver some wit that may elicit a snigger from time to time but generally grates.

There are multiplayer modes, ranging from one where only kills with a special golden Uzi count, to another where players carry jelly. These aren’t any more fun than the single player and still have the same broken, lazy gameplay.

Overall it looks like a cheap arcade title, and if this had been released on Xbox Live Arcade or the PSN as a small download it might have been easier to overlook its flaws. As it is, Naughty Bear is very short, but still too long. It looks bland and unfinished, playing it feels awkward and frustrating and the occasional amusing cutesy death scene is not enough to make up for a game that would struggle to entertain even for a lunch break. Before the tutorial was over I was already sick of it. The concept had massive potential, but the result isn’t naughty, it’s just bad.  [4]