Playing out like a sadistic kids TV programme, the kind Halloween’s Michael Myers probably had the boxset of, Naughty Bear is broken up into a series of seven episodes. Finish an episode with a good enough score to earn a gold, silver or bronze cup and you start unlocking further episodes, or sub-challenges for your current ep.
Each episode involves a different event on the island, like a bear running for mayor with a manifesto that includes the extermination of Naughty, or a bake day gone very, very wrong, and it’s up to you to disrupt proceedings as much as possible. To do so you must utilise the various weapons and traps on offer. Weapons range from knives to golf clubs, all scattered around the island, ready for havoc in your vengeful paws. You can also sabotage the various contraptions dotted around the level, like a barbecue or giant cake mixer, to lure bears to their fate, or set bear traps and landmines to send them on their way to meet the great toy maker in the sky.
Those preferring a more stealthy approach can stalk victims from the island’s plentiful woods, which offer Naughty a safe haven from most of his enemies. Once a target is close by, Naughty can leap out and scare his foes into submission with his malevolent boo.
The more mayhem Naughty causes, the more panicked and stricken his foes become. Push them far enough without killing them and they’ll instead be driven insane, and run around the island emitting pitiful whimpers. Once they reach this point of mental disrepair, a final scare will drive them headlong over the edge and they’ll take their own lives with whatever object they are carrying. You’ll be surprised at how shocking teddy hari-kiri can be.
The quicker you kill, the more your score multiplier increases and as we all know points mean prizes, in this case in the form of various unlockables. Different hats give Naughty different stats, and later on there are even costumes that offer new abilities, and can influence the behaviour of the other bears.
Early on it is straight-forward enough to snare and slaughter, with little comeback from your potential victims. However, as you progress soldier bears armed with uzis, katana-wielding ninja bears and even undead zombie teds will stand in your way. Bears will also call for help should they get too spooked, and Perfection Island’s police force is quite chucklesome the first few times they pull up in their little boat, ready to dish out furry justice.
As you might have anticipated, the game’s challenge is light-years from the likes of Ninja Gaiden II but with the increasingly powered foes it is at least not a completely one-sided battle. Should you take some damage then life-giving cake is liberally scattered around the island. Glowing blue orbs that temporarily freeze your multiplier can also be picked up, opening up the path to those big points that will snag a gold cup, and a higher place on the games global leaderboards, the top score from which is handily displayed in game.
The bright hand-stiched style menus are lovely, and chime merrily away as you scroll through them, but promise more than the actual game delivers. Perfection Island is a cutesy enough world, although rendered fairly bland thanks to little variation and large swaths of woodland that make up a lot of the environment. To say the simplistic graphics will stretch your 360 is like saying a 2kg dumbbell would have stretched Arnie in his pomp. This added to the small sandbox world and you start to focus more on the faults that perhaps could be overlooked in a game with a larger, more complex environment.
Firstly, Naughty Bear’s nemeses aren’t the brightest, and while they get tougher to beat, they still fall for the same tricks that catch them out early on. Not that there is much diversity to the murderous methods that can be deployed. It would be unfair to say that once you’ve completed the first episode you’ll have seen all there is to see, but you will have a fair idea of what will follow, with mainly cosmetic changes to differentiate between each episode.
505 Games have at least made an attempt at offering variety through each episode’s sub-challenges. In these you’ll be tasked with driving bears insane, rather than maiming them, or have to get through missions without being hurt or seen. Most won’t find these alternatives too much of a bother, but these sub-challenges do offer, if not a breath, then a wheeze of fresh air to proceedings.
There are also a small number of multiplayer modes to experience, but we were unable to connect to matches at the time of going to press. Once this portion of the game is better populated, players will be able to enjoy modes such as Cake Walk and Golden Oozy, which are unlocked via progress in the main game.
The initially amusing cheesy voiceover soon grows tiresome as well. Not that the script is particularly bad, indeed some of the gleefully announced kills, such as Furious Forward Defensive after clubbing a bear with a cricket bat, are entertaining the first few times you hear them but the narration could have done with a more of a polish and expansion to keep things vibrant.
The game’s camera is functional, and objects like trees helpfully become translucent when Naughty ducks behind them but things occasionally get muddled. Naughty himself is basic enough to control although there is sometimes slight lag between your input and his actions. We also experienced a few bugs like stuck bears. Maybe they had just become bored wandering Perfection Island’s small surroundings and had decided to go on strike? Contextual interactions can also be a bit fiddly, requiring unnecessary precision at times and take a moment longer than necessary to register. These detractions soon overshadow what throwaway enjoyment can be had with Naughty Bear.
The game’s target audience is also difficult to fathom. The box specifies a sensible PEGI rating of 12+ but it’s hard to imagine teenagers opting for fluffy kills such as these over the latest marine-packed first person shooter.
Adults might approach with a more open mind, and find the simple subversion of toys diverting, but will soon tire of the game’s thin plot, leaving Naughty Bear caught in no man’s land.
With a target audience being hard to pinpoint, the game’s overall sentiment leaves a nagging doubt as you continue to unleash violent retribution to your hapless prey. Naughty is angry at being shunned by the other bears, but if this is a young teen’s game, what kind of message is being sent out when this pent up aggression is released via mass murder? Mature gamers looking for simple catharsis from the daily grind will be sated for a short while, and from this aspect it is perhaps being too po-faced and demanding to expect more morality from a title that is clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
It is highly doubtful 505 Games’ ever intended to release a title called Naughty Bear as a far-reaching social commentary. Certainly the shortage of actual blood and gore, and instead blink-and-you-miss-them bursts of internal fluff, distance the game further from accusations of promoting wanton bloodthirst. It’s also not 505’s fault that some parents are irresponsible with the games they allow their kids to play. Even so, the game is still dressed up as a cute, colourful adventure, so the idea of a child still learning the rules of right and wrong getting their hands on this through parental ignorance is a worry.
These criticisms aside, the kitschy entertainment on offer in Naughty Bear still remains passable for short bursts, but for a full-price release you are entitled to expect more for you money. On the whole the experience feels undercooked. With a bit more care and attention it could have been a more amiable, longer-lasting diversion, and even a guilty pleasure you hide between copies of Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2. It is also a title that would have benefited from distribution at a budget price or, better-still, through XBLA. However, in its full-priced form, the game is a slender package that only offers fleeting moments of invention and entertainment. In the end Naughty Bear just isn’t very durable, and after a few hours of play starts to resemble the rather forlorn, moth-eaten teddy bear you abandoned in your youth.
