Often when playing a game you’ll find that you’ve played something in a similar vein – while the actual engine, plot and characters may change the general ideas are the same – be it a hack n slash, a racing game or a shooter. However, once in a while a developer – in this case 505 Games – tries to create something unique that hasn’t been done so many times before. Obviously this can be a risk – as you can’t guarantee what people will think. Taking such a chance, 505 Games brings us a new experience, in the form of Naughty Bear.
Naughty Bear takes place on ‘Perfection Island’, an isle populated by cute and colourful ‘Care Bear’-like teddy bears who live in peace enjoying cakes, dancing and other innocent activities. However, one bear is an exception – the game’s anti-hero who is disliked by all the other bears for being so naughty. Rejected by the others, Naughty takes it upon himself to exact his revenge by exterminating the cute bears with various methods of bludgeoning, maiming and scaring them to death. Somewhat in the vein of The Simpsons’ Itchy and Scratchy and South Park, Naughty Bear takes a seemingly innocent scenario and riddles it with psychopathic adult humour.
The style of the game is quite interesting, initially giving the feel of a children’s show as the convincing Narrator talks to naughty in a cheerfully patronising tone. The narrator is actually one of my favourite aspects of the game – while cheesy, it’s quite funny listening to a convincing children’s narrator talking naughty into exacting revenge, and shouting “CARnage!” gleefully as Naughty proceeds to smash a bear’s head in with a car door.
The gameplay of Naughty Bear involves a seven different stages, each containing a set of levels set in the same area with different objectives. Each stage has one bear in particular that must be targeted, such as stage one – ‘The Party’ – where Naughty must hunt down the birthday bear Daddles, who didn’t invite him to his party. Although the game gives the impression that it’s focused on killing innocent bears, I actually found myself sympathising with Naughty a little – the other bears seemed quite irritating and smug as they rejected him from their group. But perhaps that just helps you get into Naughty’s mindset.
Each level involves progressing through a few areas, meeting certain objectives in order to move to the next area until you ultimately reach the last area where the target bear resides. The normal levels require you to build up a certain amount of points to progress, by performing naughty actions such as killing bears, smashing things or destroying optional items such as Daddles’ birthday presents on the first stage. Once you have accumulated enough points you can move to the next area, rinse and repeat. Every time you complete a stage you are rewarded either a Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum cup, and following stages are unlocked by winning a set amount of a certain kind of cup.
It’s generally up to you how you wish to progress through the main stages – whether you want to be sneaky or simply go around beating up any bears you see. However, they’re not entirely defenceless – once aware of Naughty’s presence they will do what they can to deal with him, whether it’s avoiding him, calling for help, or fighting back. While some bears are cowardly, others will arm themselves with weapons of their own and will attack. While it’s possible to simply attack all the bears head on (to begin with, anyway), more points are awarded for being clever and more tactical.
Naughty has a few different abilities available to progress through the game. While general objects such as doors and windows can be passed through by a button press, many objects and appliances can be interacted with in one of two ways – they can either be destroyed, or sabotaged. Destroying objects gives you points – and with some vehicles, prevents bears from using said boat or car to escape the island when they get scared. However, for more tactical purposes you can sabotage them instead. Doing so will then give you more opportunities for special “ultra-kills” or “ultra-scares”, while bears are distracted trying to use or repair said objects. There are also other items littered around the areas, such as traps that can be set (bear-traps and mines), cake which gives you health, and ice capsules that freeze your multiplier for a while. The multiplier is a key factor for getting those high scores – chaining naughty actions can knock it from a 1x, to a 5x, all the way up to the maximum of a 100x multiplier for huge points. However, failure to be destructive or kill a bear will result in the meter slowly dropping back down.
This brings me to the main focus of the game – taking down your ‘fellow’ bears. Now, it’s possible to simply beat them until they die, using knives, bats, swords and even guns, but the better way to do it is with stealth. Once a bear is vulnerable – fixing a sabotaged object, stuck in a bear-trap, sitting in a vehicle, or attempting to use the payphone to call for back-up, the game will notify you of their action with a pop-up camera box. Then you need to act fast – once you get close enough you can press R2 (or RT) in order to do a contextual kill. These can be quite hilarious, watching a Naughty beat a bear to death with a phone before punching it down the poor creature’s throat, or grinding their face into fluff on a disco turntable. Similarly, when a bear is wounded from a beating, you can finish them with a special kill in the same way, the animation varying dependant on the weapon you have equipped.
However, to score even more points it’s possible to drive bears insane. Rather than beating them, it’s possible to ‘Boo’ at the other bears, in order make Naughty roar in their faces to knock them into a state of fear. Once scared enough, the bear will run around in a state of hysteria, now vulnerable to ultra-kills, and even better – the ultra scare. The scare itself isn’t that impressive, basically just Naughty grabbing them and roaring in their face, but this then triggers the bear to commit suicide. Just as funny as the other contextual kills, the bears will kill themselves with whatever weapon they have equipped – committing seppuku with a blade, or shooting themselves in the head with their gun. This is the highest scoring way to kill a bear – and can also cause chains of hysteria as bears will get more scared as they see deaths and other scary scenes – allowing you to scare the newly insane bears into a chain of suicides. Nice.
And that’s the basis of the game. The levels get tougher as the story progresses, adding in new threats such as Ninja bodyguards equipped with katanas, and gun-wielding army bears who can cause very fast death if you get seen. However, clearing some stages with certain cups will unlock new costumes for Naughty, granting him new abilities and statistics. All suits have a rating of strength, speed, health and accuracy, obviously with some of the better costumes harder to unlock. Aside from making Naughty look quite funny at times – such as the police costume which comes fully equipped with a flashing helmet – some also come pre-equipped with certain weapons, which serves to save both time and effort, and some disguise Naughty so that he is able to walk among the bears without alerting suspicion on sight.
As I said, each stage has various levels within it (i.e. 1-1, 1-2, 1-3), each of which gives a new challenge within the level with special requirements. These different modes consist of challenges such as murdering them all, avoiding taking any damage, beating the stage under time constraints, or only being able to attack with contextual kills. Usually breaking the rules of the stage will result in failure, so these stages often offer more challenge than the regular levels – and it helps to mix up the gameplay and helps you develop other ways to play.
The game has some interesting ideas, but I can’t really decide how to feel about it. Although the style of the game has been pulled off quite well, the style itself feels a little disjointed and I’m unsure what audience the title is aimed at exactly. While the cutesy simplicity of the teddy-bear theme feels as though I’m perhaps a little old for the game, the game is obviously not for children with its very violent actions. I did find the game funny for a little while, but I don’t find myself drawn to playing it. Although I did enjoy the narration and had some simple fun with the game, I’d say if idea of murdering teddy-bears doesn’t initially appeal to you, the game probably won’t be giving you any unexpected joy.
Naughty Bear is an interesting new concept, but feels a little repetitive and simple – I think in most cases the game is a little immature for adults, but a little too mature for children. There’s some easy fun here if you’re looking for something to mess around with to kill some time, but I wouldn’t expect anything too deep.
-Leon
Naughty Bear supplied for review by 505 Games.
Out now on PlayStation3 and Xbox 360
