From having small expectations to receiving a large experience, it seems that VARSAV Game Studios and Bigben Interactive really knew what they were doing when they made Bee Simulator. The amount of information and explore-able terrain their game offers is outstanding and sure to teach you something about multiple aspects in a bees life, as well as facts about other animals and insects, while you are just out having fun. Let’s begin a quick breakdown of what they offer.
Story
As a newly born bee, you must find your place in the hive and begin helping the colony by completing your work. Not long after you started doing your duties as a pollen collector, humans begin to attack your hives home tree and forcing the colony to find a new home. While the scouts continue to search, your curiosity sends you out exploring while collecting pollen and seeing new areas. Mixing your duties with that of a guard, you will have to fend off the invaders that attempt to take advantage of the hive’s weak moments. As many threats continue to persist, can you ensure the survival of your buzzing colony?
Gameplay
Our main mechanic to focus on throughout the game is your flight. While offering the freedom to fly in any direction and flip in any way you desire, it can easily be the reason you end up losing your orientation on which direction you are going. This may seem like a small factor, especially since you can adjust the sensitivity, but once you reach the point where you are doing the races and chases through the green rings, you will find yourself in a slight struggle due to the controls.
A good thing about the flying mechanic is that you can gather boost from eating sugary items, such as fruit and candy, or from little boost icons during the chase and race challenges. This boost makes you fly a bit faster, reaching your destination much quicker overall. You can use this boost while going through a wind current to maximize your speed.
Speaking of the wind current. there will be aspects in the environment that can be an aid or a blockade to your flight path. You can find wind currents that blow in all sorts of directions meaning that the same one that helped you in one direction will be an obstacle when heading back unless you go around it. There are many other aspects that can be an obstacle, like a large patch of flies or bees that slow you down, so be aware of your surroundings while flying.
During the story mode, you will come across a few challenges, such as race/chase, fighting, and dancing. These challenges can be chosen to be done in the free fly modes as well by flying into the highlighted color beam when you find one; each challenge type is color-coded. Each challenge is to be handled in a different way and is easy to figure out. Dancing is played out like a game of Simon Says, Fighting is played out like a quick time even but there is a time bar that slowly increases giving you a visual queue on what to expect, and the racing/chasing challenges are exactly what they sound like but you can NOT miss the green rings during it.
Collecting pollen is as simple as flying over a flower with a bubble on it. If you switch to Bee Vision, you can see the rarity of the flower you are taking pollen from with the rarest of flowers giving the most pollen. Once you collect a full batch of pollen, you drop it off at your hive for knowledge points. These points can be used to unlock statues in the trophy room, once you have encountered the insect or creature, or to activate a 3D model of whichever creature you have already unlocked.
Graphics and Sounds
This game has a simplistic cartoon-style visual set up that gives an aesthetically pleasing design overall. Everything is easy to tell what it is and creatures ranging from the housefly to the full-sized deer all look distinct and accurate to the size proportion of a bee. A good amount of detail was put into the game’s surroundings and overall size comparison.
Sound effect wise, the game does a good job as well. You can always tell what is going on around you based on the noise and everything seems to be accurate down to the point of distance. The music played is of simple design that gives a friendly atmosphere or shifts to the intense atmosphere of challenging and dangerous moments.
Replayability
While the story mode gives you no real reason to play through it again, the free fly mode that unlocks after the games completed and the split-screen free fly mode gives players plenty of reason to keep on playing. Whether they are just trying to have fun, playing through the life of a bee and collecting pollen or want to explore an open area to learn more about the creatures and animals around them, there is a lot to do in this game outside of the story mode. There are even little challenges for almost every possible action the player can do!
What Could Be Better
The overall flight controls were a bit messy and made it easy to get confused over a simple mistake. The ability to fly upside, while realistic, shouldn’t be in the game. Or at least it should be locked behind a specific button on the controller so it isn’t so easy to do. Simply limiting how far the player can turn in any direction would help with the orientation when flying quickly and/or running into an obstacle.
They should have added a free fly mode for single players that doesn’t require completing the game. Sure, the questline can be completely ignored if the player just wants to fly around, but more aspects of the world open up when the player completes the game. If they wanted to have the game set up the way it is, then there should be a mode option for single players to choose that would give them the freedom and ability to play the game as it is provided to those on the split-screen mode. This complaint can also be said vice versa towards the lack of split-screen players being able to complete the story mode together.
Conclusion
Bee Simulator is simply a BEEautiful game! It includes a lot more creatures and overall map size than I expected initially along with tons of information about the other insects and creatures with a heavier focus on bee’s (of course). I really enjoyed the gameplay and style they went with for the game. I was also pleasantly surprised by how educational it was. I feel like I know so much more about bee’s and a few other animals as well now.
