Bee Simulator (Xbox One)
When a game identifies itself as a simulator, it’s usually one of two things. It could be an attempt to provide a somewhat realistic adaptation of a real world profession like farming or truck driving, or it could be a parody game where playing as something like a surgeon or a goat is made completely ridiculous. While these both have their own type of appeal, neither one is really tapping into one of the most unique aspects of making a simulator game: allowing a human being to play as something they’d have no chance of experiencing in the real world. This is why the premise of Bee Simulator is so intriguing, the title actually allowing you to be a bee.
In Bee Simulator you play a single honeybee in a large hive, and while you won’t be living out the entire life of this little insect, you are given a little plot thread to follow. Taking place in a fictionalized version of New York’s Central Park, your bee begins its adventure simply performing its role as a pollen collector. However, when the bees realize the hive is at risk of being destroyed by the humans, you need to help find a new place to set it up. You’ll notice pretty quickly that Bee Simulator is not trying to be realistic in its portrayal of how you interact with the other insects. It makes some degree of sense to have them communicate in English so the player can understand them, but during play you’ll end up meeting other bugs like ants, flies, and wasps that all somehow speak a language universal to all animals. Even larger mammals can be spoken with, nothing embodying the break from realism more than a side mission where the bee helps reunite a young squirrel with its foster family.
It would certainly be easy to make a list of where Bee Simulator breaks away from reality to either make its gameplay more interesting or give it more of a plot. The real life activities of a single bee would likely get bland quickly as their lives are fairly simple and regimented by their role in the hive. However, there are attempts to adapt the most important details of a bee’s life, and of course, one of the most important aspects of a simulator is going to be trying to provide an accurate form of control. Flying around as the bee takes some getting used to even after the tutorial has wrapped up. While the game teaches you that you can hold buttons to hover up or down, the more natural and useful means of flight is learned by adjusting your view in real time with a control stick to fly towards whatever your bee is pointed at. Stinging remains a little awkward throughout, the game never asking too much of it but knowing if your sting will hit its mark remains ambiguous, partially because Bee Simulator is an odd mix of lovely visuals and unpolished models. You might be dazzled the first time you fly through the hive or are flying around a cave and see worms wiggling out of the dirt, but while the bugs all look fairly nice, the humans and larger animals seem to be lacking in detail and feature odd collision detection. There is a nice adventurous soundtrack backing things, but the craftsmanship put into the game does seem oddly skewed at times.
After some time spent getting the hang of flight you will be able to weave your way around the park pretty well, and its Central Park inspiration makes it a fairly interesting place to explore. There’s a greenhouse full of exotic plants, a zoo with animals from around the world, a boathouse by a pond, and humans setting up different ways to entertain themselves like a concert, fair, and picnics. The game also peppers little collectibles around these areas and gives you side quests to work towards. You can discover different flora and fauna to add to a journal, although triggering their addition seems to not always work unless you’re in the exact right spot. The game will track how many balloons you pop, human food you feast on, baby bees you help rescue, and other little activities that don’t exactly qualify as missions but give you something to do while you fly around the park. Sometimes you will be spending quite a while getting from one place to another, even when you start getting fast travel options to specific locations, so being able to deviate from the plot or side missions to mess around is appreciated, especially since you can be rewarded with new species of bee to play as or hats to wear.
Admittedly, putting a wizard hat on your bee strays pretty far from authentic simulation of a bee life, but most of the story and side missions are composed of activities a bee could find itself involved in. Collecting pollen is of course a common task, the player needing to fly near flowers to gather it. A special vision mode will let you identify the best sources of pollen, but besides applying a timer to the task, there really isn’t much to gathering it besides simply putting in the time. Dancing isn’t much of a step up either. Bees communicate to each other through dance, but here, the act is just a matter of repeating the moves you see the other bee do, the sequence never getting too difficult but certainly feeling a little long later in the game.
Combat is interesting not so much because of how it controls, but because it’s pretty much the area most impacted by your difficulty setting. The higher difficulty will make timers tighter for other missions, but the combat completely changes. It can either be the easier activity of just pressing the buttons indicated on screen with the proper timing or a real time fight where you need to defend against the attacks of wasps while taking your openings to strike back. Perhaps the best of the four activities you’ll be repeating quite often though is the one least grounded in reality. Your bee will sometimes be tasked with following another bug or challenging one to a race, and since this asks for precise flight as you pass through rings for boosts and avoid hazards like wind gusts, gnat clouds, and spider webs, it can actually prove to be a challenge. It even engages with the flight controls well, but it experiences a similar problem to the other three main activities. While they are a decent backbone to the story, the fact they are recycled so often for the optional side missions means they will easily lose their luster if you want to engage with the game world more.
THE VERDICT: Bee Simulator tries to take the expected activities of a realistic bee simulation and spice them up to be more fitting for video game play, but it does so to mixed results. Its cute story is a good framework for things and the park you explore is teeming with interesting sights and little things to do, but the bulk of the game is spent doing shallow adaptations of bee activities. Pollen gathering, dancing, combat… rather than being given the emphasis they need to make these key portions of the game interesting, the side missions and self-guided exploration end up more exciting, although at least the races are a good fit for the flight controls. Despite the skewed priorities it is a world that can provide interesting activities, but the recycled content fills too much of the space to even earn this bee game a B grade.
And so, I give Bee Simulator for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. I really wanted this game to be better. Bees are my favorite type of insect and I would love a game that either let you experience a fairly accurate simulation of their life or used only a hint of realism to make an exciting action game, but Bee Simulator finds itself awkwardly between those two ideas. The pollen gathering is surprisingly mundane despite its importance, the dancing has been made into a weak minigame, and the breaks from reality pull it away from the excuse that it is trying to be accurate in some form. However, when you accept that Bee Simulator is going to be a bit more like a children’s show in the way its animals communicate with each other and you can do a few silly things like dress up your bee, you then find the gameplay relies on a few generic templates too often. There are plenty of fun areas to explore, achievement hunting and collecting both encouraging you to enjoy the detailed park environment, but the more structured missions keep tapping onto the play styles the game didn’t add enough depth to. When it does get strange like helping the squirrels though it can be funny or different, but there isn’t enough to do in Bee Simulator that breaks away from the more typical mediocre missions.
Bee Simulator is still an interesting experience because of the dashes of realism. Flying around as the little bug is fairly well done and there’s enough to the world to keep your brain stimulated, but over time you’ll eventually hit on the same activities and they aren’t evolved in the ways necessary to keep the game fresh. If you want to be a bee this might still be your best bet. The breaks from reality make up for their lack of authenticity by allowing for more interesting activities than the real bug could do, but the experience is far too uneven to make life as this bee truly exciting.