Reviews

Naughty Bear has an interesting concept. The titular teddy is an outcast on the perfect and cutesy lovable teddy bear island. Even the stone hearted would feel sorry for a naughty stuffed bear when the rest of the perfect island fail to invite him to a big party. Rather than cry in a dark corner, Naughty Bear decides to inflict his revenge on the entire population by knocking the stuffing out of each and every last bear.

Now, do you sympathise with the destructive bear for being left out, or do you blame it all on himself for his bad attitude and feel he should let the rest of the island live in perfect happiness? The first one of course, you are "Naughty" Bear after all, and nothing sounds more appealing that ripping the innards out of another teddy bear. If only it was that fun.

While at first, the kiddie programme narration (similar to Teletubbies) makes you think you've been conned into playing a game based off a popular cartoon show on CBeebies, it's soon clear that your ultimate task is to rid the island of all the goody two-shoe bears - by killing them brutally. By axe, machete, baseball bat, Uzi, or anything else you can grab to beat them to a pulp, or even putting weapons aside and scaring the bears to death with your evil roar. Sounds great, right? But that's where the greatness ends!

The game is set out over seven missions, each of which consist of several parts all based around the same thing. Certain objectives will be set, some of which optional (such as score a certain amount of points, kill every last bear without any escaping, and so on), but there's always an ultimate task - this being a specific target that needs to see the fury of your wrath. Once the main objective is complete, you can then go about the other sections, which add a little variety to the same task. These include time limits, stealth, untouchable and score targets.

A score is achieved by destroying everything you can and wasting bears. By killing bears in quick succession, with a variety of methods, you'll quickly tally up naughty points with the game indicating just how bad you are. Plus you'll receive a bronze, silver or gold trophy at the end to indicate how badass a bear you've become. Stick around too long though, and the bear police will arrive, and they have guns.

What starts off as fairly humorous and fun, very quickly becomes repetitive and tiresome. The missions are very short, they're all set on the same small island, and even the killing becomes a little dull. There are only so many times you can slice a bear with a knife before it's simply not interesting anymore. Even the multiplayer is the same, but this time against other players - not that this saves it, as no one is actually playing the game online.

The problems could have been solved with a lot more thought, and development time. The fact that you can brutally kill as well as stealth around in bushes suggest that the game could (and quite frankly, should) have been one long stealth /action adventure, rather than repetitive lacklustre mission segments. It's fun in very small doses, which is probably why the developer separated the game into very small missions, but there's very little imagination to what was promised in early reveals.

A game that has a rampant teddy bear seeking murderous revenge on an island full of cutesy, cuddly fuzzy-wuzzies sounds like a game that many of us would kill to play. The main character looks bad ass, and the thought of placing an axe into another teddy bear's head is one to get the thumbs tingling, and also one to put a cheeky smile on our face (go on, admit it). Sadly, Naughty Bear isn't that game. Naughty Bear should have been Manhunt with teddy bears, but instead it's a fragmented and repetitive affair that fails to come anywhere near to the potential of its premise.