The premise of Naughty Bear is that the other bears make fun of you and don’t include you in their activities. You didn’t get invited to a party that is going to take place so you are going to make the other bears pay by exacting your revenge. Naughty Bear is a title that could have been a cool change of pace from other titles. Unfortunately it is a completely mess. Technically speaking this game is really bad. It has a lot of frame rate problems whenever you are trying to do something. There were multiple times when the game locked up my console and I had to restart. There was even a time where Naughty Bear got stuck in the environment even though there was nothing to get stuck on. There are a whole host of graphical glitches. There were many times when I would go for an ultra kill and Naughty Bear would walk through a wall to take out that bear. There was another instance where I would be going through an ultra kill animation and Naughty Bear would be completely missing his target but the other bear would still feel the punishment. There were other times when you could see the other bears glitching as they walked around. It is really a sight to behold and not in a good way.

As you progress through the game the developers try to change things up on you by introducing new bear types, sort of a class system. You have your normal bears and then you have your cop bears, army bears, zombie bears and more. Even though they try and change up the bears themselves the stages aren’t given much consideration. It is like they simply utilized the copy and paste command for each stage and then maybe tweaked a couple things to try and fool the player into thinking it was a new stage. My strategy remained the same for the majority of my time playing the game too. You don’t want the bears to escape when you begin your rampage so the first things I would always do is destroy the car and the boat so they couldn’t get away. Once those two items were destroyed I didn’t have to worry about anyone escaping because we were on the Island of Perfection.

The more bears that you begin to encounter the more weapon choices that you get. This game has “ultra kills” which are canned animations of you killing a bear. One of my favorite ones was performing an “ultra kill” with a stick. Naughty Bear would mount another bear and then rub the stick really quickly like you would do to start a fire. Once the stick caught on fire Naughty’s unfortunate target was immediately incinerated. It looked cool and I chuckled the first time I saw it, however, it does get old rather quickly. Another part of this game is trying to scare the bears. You can accomplish this through a number of feats such as popping out of a hiding spot when they are walking by, putting down bear traps where they will walk right into it or them simply seeing you walk around will get them in a panic. As they see your destruction that will also help drive them over the edge. If one bear sees me kill another bear it could drive him to the point of insanity. If that occurs than you can go up to that bear and scare him. Once you do that he completely loses his mind and kills himself. It is another cool concept that is marred with horrendous execution. As you progress you are given different criteria for advancing to the next level. Sometimes you need to get a certain number of points and sometimes it is just that you need to take out everyone. There are other instances where you need to take someone out without touching them. That is where your scare tactics would come into place. I found a good combination to be sneaking up on a bear after they got caught in a bear trap and scaring them. A lot of the time that bear would go insane on the spot and kill themselves without me having to touch them. I also wanted to briefly mention the multiplayer. Naughty Bear does have multiplayer but it appears to be completely broken. I tried to get some games going and the connection would always drop before the round would start.

What is most disappointing about Naughty Bear is that it had a good premise. This game could have been really awesome. Unfortunately this game was rushed out the door in an unfinished state. One has to wonder how this title made it out of QA testing or if it even went through any testing at all. This is a title that will be immediately forgotten by those who have played it especially with some of the year’s biggest releases coming out in the next couple of months. What is even worse is that they are charging people almost full price for this game. If for whatever reason you still want to try out Naughty Bear then be sure to rent it.You’ll feel a lot better losing the few dollars to rent it rather than losing the fifty dollars if you purchase it.

Score 3/10

Originally posted on Totally Gaming Network