The Video Game Acclaim

            When I first got my hands on Naughty Bear I admit I was kind of excited. I had seen reviews saying how bad that game was, but I didn’t pay attention to them because the game had such a crazy looking idea. You are a stuffed bear that gets shunned by other bears, so you go on a crazy rampage to de-stuff every bear that moves. Not to seem sadistic but this seemed fun to me. It was a game that obviously didn’t take itself seriously and I like relaxing and playing a game every once in a while that isn’t made to be an award winning game. I was horribly wrong.

            After I put in the disc I was greeted with a screen of happy looking stuffed bears that then flashed to dead looking bears. The game starts with the narrator describing your sad life and how YOU were not invited to some other bear’s birthday party. The narrator then says to take out every other bear. I was enjoying the game so far, but then I got control over the bear and everything went wrong. Both the movement controls and the camera controls were so unbelievably hard to maneuver with, I could hardly stand playing the game… but I persevered. Yet the more I played, the more I hated this game. The graphics are last gen and look terrible, and there seems to be only one animation for each way to kill a bear, and there aren’t a lot of ways. After you beat a bear down it will give you the option to kill it. This leads to an animation of beating down the bear, tearing and slashing, causing stuffing to fly out of nowhere. And when I say nowhere I mean no cut or anything appears in the other bear, the stuffing just… appears. There also are the occasional glitches. One time I went to stop a bear from driving off in a car but when I did the action to kill, instead of grabbing the bear out of the car and slamming the car door into it’s head, the bear appeared a few feet in front of my bear so I slammed the door into nothing but the bear still died from it. The story does not really progress from there. The 8 levels don’t go past “this person does not like you, you should do something about that”. There are extra missions inside each level but they don’t actually seem any different from playing the original level.

            To be honest I didn’t make it past the 3^rd level. The game was just annoying the heck out of me and I could not take playing it any longer. To anyone who is thinking about even renting this game; DON’T. It’s not worth your time and there are many other MUCH better games that you could be playing. Naughty Bear gets a 5.5 out of 10 for an interesting idea but nothing else.