To bee or not to bee?  Well now you can be a bee in Bee Simulator.  It’s a flying action game where you play a part of a honey bee in a hive, and must fly around a vast park to collect pollen, battle rival bugs, and ultimately save your hive from construction workers who want to chop the tree down where your hive is located.  It’s available on all current game consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

Play control is similar to how I imagine flying a helicopter would be.  You’ll use the L stick to move, and the R stick to aim where you need to go.  You can also press the L and R trigger buttons to hover up and down.  As you buzz about the park, you’ll run over flowers and collect pollen.  This fills up a meter and when it’s full, you’ll need to go back to the hive to drop off your pollen to make honey.  This will give you points, though.  When you collect certain types of pollen in a row, you can fill up your “Beetro” meter which helps you fly fast by pushing the R shoulder button.  To find special types of pollen, press the R stick to enter “Bee Vision” so you can see what kind of pollen each flower has.  You’ll start the game off in a tutorial which explains all this to you.

The main game is mission based, with arrows and yellow markers telling you where to go.  Sometimes you may have to battle bugs in a turn-based rhythm mini-game, or repeat bee dance moves in a memory game.  There are also side missions that are depicted by different colored markers, and include collecting certain types of pollen and ring races.  Doing these will net you points, too.

While I loved the graphics and unique gameplay, there is one main thing that ruined the game for me: ring races.  Sometimes you must fly through rings quickly and those parts are not fun.  Didn’t they learn anything from Superman 64’s mistakes?  Granted, those sections aren’t near as bad, but flying through rings shouldn’t be a major gameplay aspect when it’s not fun.  Especially since flying can be disorienting sometimes.  And slightly unclear goals, even with the markers, keep Bee Simulator from being the bee’s knees.  But if you can look past all that and enjoy unique and quirky games, you may want to give this one a try anyway.

Kid Factor:

Bee Simulator is rated E for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Mild Fantasy Violence.  You can battle other bugs by ramming into them, but they just fly away when defeated.  You can sting things, too, but that’s mostly used to pop balloons.  Reading skill is helpful for the text, and younger gamers may need help with the complicated controls and challenging missions, even on the Easy setting.

One good thing is that Bee Simulator can be considered educational.  Granted, bees probably don’t use “Beetro” to fly faster, but they do show how bees communicate with dances and scents, and the intro explains how bees are important to the environment.  The library in the hive has facts on animals you’ve run across, and there are other interesting bee facts during loading screens.  So if you have a kid who enjoys learning about bees and bugs, they might like this.

Tags: Game Reviews