Minutes into Bee Simulator I knew it wasn’t meant for me. Bee Simulator is a simple game designed for children. That fact was evident by the warm, motherly voice acting that so many of the bees possess. As an adult, I found the motherly voice acting condescending like I was suddenly in a kid’s reading group in a library and I was being told how to craft popsicle stick art.
Players can name their bee and eventually customize the way it looks, but even if you name your bee a guy’s name, it’ll always be voiced by a girl. So it was a little disappointing when my be, Obee-Wan Kenobee, flew out and started talking like a 40-year-old woman trying to sound like a teenager.
The voice acting, by the way, isn’t great. Imagine adults trying to sound cute by making their voices high-pitched and squeaky. Bee Simulator was tough to listen to at times.
A story acts as an extended tutorial, sending the player out on small, bee-appropriate missions. During these missions, players learn how to take part in the handful of mini-games that will be available once the free-fly game mode is unlocked at the end of the story.
The mini-games consist of races, memory games, reaction skill games, and additional simple tasks. None of these activities were engaging for me. For example, the races involved flying through loops and the memory games involved mimicking the movements of another bee, turn-by-turn, using the W-A-S-D keys.
Flying into spiderwebs is probably the most exciting activity in Bee Simulator because escaping from the web involves completing a reaction challenge. Upon becoming entangled in the web, a red/green bar appears and an icon moves back and forth across the bar. Players must click when the icon is in the green zone to successfully escape from the web. The spider is slowly creeping in, so if the player takes too long the spider will get them.
Realizing I wasn’t going to have much fun with the game as a 29-year-old guy, I tried to remember back to what it was like being 7 or 8 years old and playing video games. For me, when I was younger, I loved exploring in games. To Bee Simulator’s credit, there is a lot to see and find in the game. There just isn’t much to do with those discoveries once you’ve made them.
The first time I saw a human, I immediately flew at them to sting them, just to see what would happen. I flew right into their arm and stung. The person yelped and moved a little bit but a few seconds later they resumed the exact pose they had before I stung them. The camera follows the bee so closely that I couldn’t see how the person reacted, just that they verbally reacted and the character model moved for a few seconds before resuming its idle animation loop.
Beyond humans, there are plenty of animals in Bee Simulator. There are dogs, deer, reptiles, rats, birds and a few surprising animals to discover. Bee Simulator is designed to be educational, so when you find an animal in the game, a little journal entry is added allowing the player to go read about the animal and look at a 3D model of the animal. The info bits are a great idea, but the execution is a bit poor.
Because the activities are so simple, I presumed the game was designed for kids between 6 and 8 years old. So, I was surprised to open up one of the notes about an animal I just found and find phrases like “regurgitation,” “enzymes” and “caste system” casually used. Bee Simulator even caught me up with its use of “refuse.” They used that word as a noun (not as a verb [i.e., “a refusal”]). Why not “trash” or “garbage” which kids are way more likely to understand.
Apart from some grammar errors, the information was concise, but an adult will definitely need to be present to explain what some of the sentences and words mean. And as an adult who played through this game, I don’t think many parents are going to be able to sit around for long with Bee Simulator.
I have to give this game a neutral rating. It’s boring to me, but it’s not made for me. There are some neat concepts in use in the game — the first-person “bee vision” allows players to better locate flowers while obscuring their general visibility — but generally, Bee Simulator isn’t that impressive. It’s an educational experience disguised as a video game.
A retail copy of this game was provided to Epic Brew by the publisher.
1 comment
[…] few months ago, you may remember me writing about Bee Simulator. While Bee Simulator wasn’t a very challenging game, I get the feeling that Hive Time is more on track for being appealing to players who enjoy the […]