If you’ve read my earlier posts, you’ll be aware that Naughty Bear was one of those oddball games that myself and my fiance were really looking forward to this summer. Unfortunately, having played it, all I can say is that this was one of the bigger gaming let-downs that I can remember.
No advance reviews came out for this game, which is usually a bad sign, as was the game’s £45 price point (no reductions anywhere, not even the token £5 in the high street to make it an “appetising” £40)… so we bit the bullet and decided to wait to rent it. Thank God we did.
Originally advertised as a sort of “Grand Theft Auto: Teddy Bear’s Picnic Edition”, what you end up with is kind of like Grand Theft Auto, but on a way smaller scale. Of course, GTA was one of the pioneer of sandbox games, where (if you had it unlocked, of course) you could wander around the huge game world without any repercussions. Naughty Bear, instead, likes to keep you in a small bucket of sand, allowing you to jump from bucket to bucket, but without letting you move back.
In a nutshell then, Naughty Bear is a bit like Manhunt, but with teddys. The main storyline is to “get back” at Daddles, a bear who didn’t invite you to his birthday party, and now you’re out to get everyone. Instead of Rothbury, this teddy manhunt is on one generic island, with generic, but named, teddy bears all featuring to either kill you, or be cannon fodder for your scaring tactics. Those tactics range from a simple “BOO!” (and enough of those can drive someone crazy enough to kill themselves), to bludgeoning them with a weapon, to bear traps, or simply sabotaging an object and using said object to kill the teddy as they try to repair it. A weird premise, but in the end, is kind of like last year’s Wii title Mad World – where it all feels a little bit repetitive in the end.
The game has seven “chapters”, each of which has five levels.Problem is, each level is held on a chain of “zones” where you cannot return – so if the first zone asks you to destroy a present, and collect (say) five rosettes as a bonus mission, you can do that, but if you only manage to collect 3 before moving onto the next part, well, you cannot go back to finish off those rosettes, which can be a huge pain in the rear for any completists out there.
The other main complaint about this game, apart from the repetitiveness of the kills, is it’s difficulty. After about an hour, you’re suddenly thrust with a “friendly challenge”, where your whole gameplan is to not hit the other teddy bears. Weird, I know, as the game is forcing you to use “contextual kills” (that is, booing them to death, catching them in bear traps and wringing their necks, or distracting them and killing them via sabotage.) Unfortunately, the controls are a little weird, and without any fixed aim (Naughty Bear seems to aim wildly at whatever you’re looking at, instead of autolocking onto a victim), it’s all too easy to go from opening a door to hitting a bear behind it, thus losing you the level.
If you do manage to get through the level without hitting any other bears, the game will probably rob you of victory on points. Yes, Naughty Bear’s other big thing is that you’re awarded for points – and the bigger the rampage you’re on the more points you get. So if you slowly go around and kill the bears without touching them, you’ll not get enough points to succeed. Go too fast, and you fail. It’s a weird dynamic where you have to be fast enough to get enough points, without rushing around in a blunderbuss style and accidentally slashing a bear with a machete. And this is only for level three!
Away from the gameplay, the narrator feels like a good old-fashioned children’s TV story narrator, with the tones and speech patterns matching the stuff we’d have all heard growing up. Sadly, his voice is the only thing you will walk away from the game remembering. Well, that and his bad puns which flash up on the screen as you end the life of a fluffy teddy bear, Mortal Kombat-style.
Naughty Bear has gotten some stick over its graphics. While they aren’t as polished as other PS3/360 titles, they aren’t that bad – I’d call them a halfway house between “modern next-gen” graphics and the souped up PS2 graphics that Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 employs. Sadly though, in a world full of Call of Dutys, Grand Theft Autos, and even Bioshocks, Naughty Bear falls well short of the genre it wants to be in, and the one joke in this game quickly wears out. It’s definitely a game to rent, or maybe pick up for a tenner when it eventually hits the bargain bins, but until then, I can see a lot of the eager first day buyers forcing this game to feature prominently in the pre-owned shelves.
