Naughty Bear (PS3)
When I first heard of the premise behind Naughty Bear, it frankly sounded rather ingenious. It’s not uncommon for teenagers to violently reject things of their youth while overenthusiastically embracing anything they believe can affirm their adulthood, but if parents and retailers took the ESRB ratings seriously, then these teens might find their search for maturity hampered by the Mature rating on violent games. Naughty Bear’s creators came up with a rather interesting way to give younger players a taste of over the top violence without getting slapped with a higher age rating, the characters carving each other apart and opening fire on each other not humans who bleed but large teddy bears whose stuffing pops out. Tapping into the corruption of childhood innocence angle as well, Naughty Bear seemed like it had found a niche for itself, but rather than going for the easy route of having this be a first person shooter or hack-and-slash, Naughty Bear has more in common with stealth games than anything else.
The action of Naughty Bear takes place on Perfection Island, a location that seems to match its name if you only took a quick glance at it. Colorful teddy bears throw birthday parties and dance at the disco with seemingly nothing to drag down their perpetual happiness, but one bear knows there’s a darker layer underneath it all, mostly because he’s a frequent victim of their bullying. Naughty Bear is a ragged old bear who lives in a hut with his only accompaniment being a rather pleasant narrator who sounds like he’s ripped right out of a British children’s show. Naughty Bear’s name may make him sound like a jerk, but he doesn’t just head out and start killing the other bears for no reason. Admittedly, the first episode of the game has him seeking violent retribution for what seems like a small slight when he learns he’s not invited to a birthday party and the other bears laugh at the gift he tried to bring to it anyway, but as you unlock later levels, you soon see the whole island has been against him for quite a while. A mayoral candidate is able to successfully leverage the promise of killing Naughty Bear as an election platform, and even though Naughty Bear is the only bear brave enough to step up to defend the island when its overrun by zombies or aliens, the citizens are still happy when an oil baron bear turns up with private security to hunt down Naughty Bear.
At times Naughty Bear does feel like a children’s show that has decided to have a normally ineffectual villain’s plans go straight for violent ends rather than mischievous pranks, the narrator certainly helping to make the setups more interesting than just a sequence of reasons for Naughty Bear to go nuts on the local populace. As mentioned earlier though, you don’t just run in guns blazing to try and take out the other bears on the island, partly because the guns are actually pretty poor choices for doing so. Naughty Bear’s episodes aren’t really about killing the other bears so much as it is doing it with enough style to earn Naughty Points. Unlocking more missions requires hitting score benchmarks, the player needing a certain amount of bronze, silver, or gold trophies to continue progressing through the plot and unlocking each level’s extra challenges. Thus, when you enter an area full of unsuspecting bears, you need to set things up to terrify them first before you take them down, the shape this takes changing based on the chapter, available objects, and how canny the opposition is.
Most bears will panic if they realize Naughty Bear is in the area, the degree to which they do so coming from the actions you’ve performed so far. Some might run and hide, others might barricade a room to hunker down in, and others might fight back, the game starting to introduce more aggressive bears like ninjas, robots, and SWAT teams as you get to later missions. While every bear can be killed if you’re willing to get dirty with a weapon or push them onto an environmental object that can end their life, Naughty Bear actually values scaring them most of all. Sneaking up to pop out and roar at them will get them more and more nervous, and there are tools to get them into perfect scaring spots such as laying down bear traps to hold them in place or sabotaging equipment in the area they’ll try to fix. There are perhaps too many ways to terrify a bear, as they’ll freak out if they see you attacking another character, panic if they find a body, get suspicious if they hear noises, and notice when things are out of sorts. You get messages for each time this happens which can make crowded levels a stream of messages that you can’t really sort out for the useful ones, but it also means you can get a huge flow of points as each of these provides some score and feeds into a combo meter that makes each one worth more.
If you can terrify a bear enough, it will eventually be driven insane and off itself, this being the highest scoring way to end a bear because it takes quite a lot of harassment to achieve and your targets do have some ways of fighting back before they are driven that far. They might pick up weapons, call in back-up, or simply try to run off and escape by boat or car, so managing how much you’re terrifying the populace with cutting off their means of retaliation or escape is key to earning the highest possible score. The problem is, if you are gunning for the gold trophies which you’ll need plenty of to unlock later levels, this process is not only rather slow but fairly repetitive. Bears can be rather stupid in that they’ll try to fix objects even while everyone is panicking over a murder, some just run around constantly so it’s hard to pull anything clever with them, and others might not leave a room or region so you have limited options to surprise them. It’s fairly likely you will just want to kill them before you got the maximum scare out of them just to spare yourself the tedium of the gradual wear down, Naughty Bear definitely getting indulgent with the style behind its kills.
Since each kill type will provide a unique score boost that diminishes the more you rely on it in a stage, you are asked to try and diversify your methods. Sometimes impaling a bear with a machete, slicing them to pieces with a ninja sword, or knocking their block off with a golf club in execution style kills is the only way you’ll be able to do it, but many stages feature environmental objects you can integrate. Push a bear into an open campfire, shove him into an active batter mixer, grind his face on the turntable, slam him in an ice box and flash freeze him, the list goes on and on for animated kills that are sure to please people looking for brutal ends to fluffy cartoon teddies. It certainly feels like Naughty Bear slipped by on a technicality with getting its age rating considering how demented some of the kill methods could be if they weren’t enacted on stuffed animals, but the brief animations at least help to alleviate some of the boredom of setting up for them.
Whether or not you embrace the stealth heavily or realize you can run around rather openly if you just keep sabotaging objects and making trouble often enough as you do so, the bears Naughty Bear is up against just don’t feel like a good target for this style of gameplay. Entering a new episode might be interesting at first since you’re getting used to new tools in the area and certain bears start fighting back actively, but if you want to unlock levels you need to do repeat set-ups constantly, many of which are visually different but involve the same legwork to activate. A failure, whether it be by your own death or failing a level objective like letting a teddy escape, leads to a whole level restart as well, and levels already take a considerable amount of time if you’re trying to get a good score since you have to harass each bear individually and repeatedly.
If Naughty Bear was just a sequence of unique episodes though, this might be a bit more tolerable. However, soon you’ll notice that you aren’t unlocking the next episode just by completing the prior one. You are, however, unlocking a bunch of extra missions that recycle a level’s design and concept with some new rule set applied. Were these optional ways to get a lot more life out of the experience they wouldn’t be a problem, they’d be there for those who like the gameplay and could be accessed at your leisure. However, if you want to get to new content or simply see the end of the fairly short story, you will have to engage with a good amount of these abundant extra missions. Playing an episode once already can start to slip into dull repetition before you’ve got your gold trophy, but returning to that same structure again and again strains it even further, especially when you look at what the mission conditions can entail.
Insanity might be one of the worse special mission types when it comes to tedium, since you can’t even kill the bears with anything but driving them mad. Friendly missions are surprisingly more tolerable even though the game says you can’t hurt the bears in that mode, but that only means with weapons. You can still do the environmental kills, lay traps, and drive them insane, so at least Friendly can be cleared faster despite removing one of your attacking methods. Killer is a bit of a tease of a mode, but rather than being free to go nuts, it’s basically the same as playing a regular episode but you just can’t let anyone escape, meaning this might be the laziest recycling of a stage of all the extra challenges. Speed Run, on the other hand, is rather refreshing, since the time limit means the score requirements are less stringent but finding out how to get enough points requires more active antagonizing and less tedious terrifying. Untouchable though ends the moment you get hurt and Invisible only lets you be seen three times before the mission is a failure, these definitely being rougher than even the Top Hat mode which is basically just an increased difficulty version of an episode’s design. You do at least get to pick from the available missions and don’t need to do them all to see the game’s ending so you can skip the worse ones, but even with the unlockable costumes that can make the main game or certain modes a little easier or faster, Naughty Bear took a game that already had a shallow gameplay loop and added more unfortunate repetition on top of it.
THE VERDICT: Naughty Bear’s idea of terrifying the teddy bear populace of an island before capping things off with stylish kills had some promise, and elements like the narrator’s delightful tone and the creativity put into the kill animations would have helped it out if the actual action you participate in wasn’t so lacking. Running around and harassing the other bears grows stale quickly as you exhaust unique ways to terrorize the rather dim opposition and settle into a boring rhythm, and then the game tries to stretch its content out even longer with a set of barely altered challenge missions. You’ll have to play some of the challenges to complete the game and many of them either make it easier to fail or add conditions that make things even less varied, so by the time you have finished Naughty Bear, whatever appeal its over-the-top violence once had has been dulled by the system you engage with to get to it.
And so, I give Naughty Bear for PlayStation 3…
A BAD rating. If Naughty Bear didn’t let you pick which of its barely changed missions it let you play to unlock new episodes, it would definitely be an outright terrible experience. The touchiness of Untouchable means retries and loading times are too common, Invisible plays poorly with the ease with which many bears might detect you or spot you when offscreen, and Insanity would be a slow slog if you had to pick it every time it cropped up in the mission list. Instead, you can vary up which of the mission types you select so that sometimes the repetition can be mildly alleviated by a simpler mission type or one that at least isn’t too stringent in its demands.
Naughty Bear’s main gameplay mode is definitely flawed at its core though because of how much it asks from you. Driving bears mad is a long process with how they jump at every shadow to make them harder to keep track of and yet they also seem surprisingly dumb at other points where they’ll stop running from danger because they want to right a cooler you kicked over. Levels are long because you need those gold trophies to make progress deeper into the game and the episode designs don’t give you enough tools to keep things fresh, especially since, despite having a high amount of creative kill animations, up until you activate the special kill, you’re swinging most of the weapons the same or sabotaging objects for similar reasons. Your options have the illusion of variety but engaging with them feels samey, so save for those dramatic finishers, a lot of the action unfolds in an unexciting manner since your room for true creativity is fairly limited.
Naughty Bear’s appeal can be found between the long stretches of sneaking about and doing the same scares again and again, but besides being impressed by the elaborate kill animations, you aren’t going to find too much else to be delighted by. Mission types like Speed Run do show that upping the pace of the game would do a lot to help it avoid becoming so tedious, a lot of the flaws not so much about how basic things are but how often you need to do such basic things in order to see new content. The game would receive a sequel and DLC so maybe its idea did resonate well enough with its intended audience, but Naughty Bear’s mix of stealth, action, and brutality against cuddly bears is let down by how everything was implemented. The looming requirements of the scoring system enforce an unenjoyable style of play on Naughty Bear that doesn’t have enough to work with to stay engaging until that next flashy kill.