This is by no means a bad game, but it leaves much to be desired. It's still pretty fun at times.
I'll start with the "design". You are in the city (hive) of bees, and after completing a certain number of tasks you do a "movie level". Overall, it's very similar to the recent Spiderman and Transformer games. The number of tasks you can do around the city are large, but you don't need to do all of them. You sometimes may want to do them all, though because some can be pretty fun. After you do what you need to do, the real levels begin. These range from pollinating flowers while flying and fighting off Dragonflies to "quick button sequences" similar to Resident Evil 4 as well as the ten other games that also copied it. You also have to navigate through rain by zooming through air currents. All these activities are the game's highlights. There is also multiplayer, but I haven't tried it yet. So the design of the game gets an 8.
Now to the gameplay. I'll start off with the pros, and then I'll go into the many cons. Okay, so since the game is meant for little tikes, it's fitting that movement and navigation is as simple as can be. Navigating the hive is fun…for the first time. Don't except a large spacious lively city that you can blow up and destroy as well as interact much with (this isn't Grand Theft Auto). It's kinda small, though most won't realize it since every block looks EXACTLY like the last, with NO landmarks and nothing to distinguish each street, road, or building. It is divided in two sections. First being the city/neighborhood section, and the second being the highway. Yes, the second section is really just a bunch of roads.
The highway is pretty hard to navigate through, since the roads go under, over and past each other. The map they give you doesn't help whatsoever. Each of the activities are spread throughout the city, and range from pizza delivery, racing, being a taxi driver, fixing cars, among 20 other things. It's cool that there is a lot of them, but after trying each once, they get pretty bland, and since they are as easy as heck, they are no challenge. It is also hard to find them in the city. You can talk to fellow bees, and each would say either of 5 random things such as "Hi", "Do you know who you're talking to?" or "I have no time to talk". Also, each gender seems to have the same voice. To get around faster, you can hop into random cars on the road (I guess bees have no problem with other bees stealing their cars) or you can buy your own with honey (the unimaginative currency in the game). There are about 6 different cars you can buy. Each one is VERY expensive, except one, but it is less cool than the cars you can hijack anyway.
There is also an Arcade somewhere in the city, but the games are rip-offs of classic games, which wouldn't be bad, but they are bad rip-offs. So far the town seems to be a very bad element in the game, but if you don't treat it as an interactive world, and more as a very cool menu replacement, it's manageable. In the main story levels, you fly, which is different from the walking that's in the Hive. Flying is very, very clunky and hard to get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it could be cool. There are few games where you can fly freely around, so it's not so much that it is handled well in the game, but more that it is fresh, making it fun.
Pollinating flowers and fighting other insects requires no skill. You'd think that fighting other creatures would be fun, but it's not as fun as it sounds. You just tap a button when your near them, and you automatically shoot honey at them that follows the enemies until they are hit. Like I said earlier, it requires no skill. A caveman could do it. Further more, pollinating is repetitive at the beginning, but after a while, it gets a little fun. You also have to fly through rain (which hurts you) and use you "Bee Vision". Bee Vision slows down time, and makes the rain slow down to. The rain looks similar to the slowed down rain in The Matrix Revolutions, and the recent game, TimeShift. It looks pretty neat.
The weird thing is that you don't really have a health meter, and it could get annoying. I came to the conclusion that the health is like that of Call of Duty's. If you continually get hit by rain, you die, but if you get hit every once in a while, you don't die. The third Movie Level's gameplay element is the times button press sequences. You have plenty of time to do press the buttons when they appear, and while the scenes turns out to be pretty cool, it just seems like the developers put them in there because they couldn't make the certain scene work as a regular level.
Now, for the more negative. There are a number of glitches. Some where you can't move, where dialogue overlaps, where there are invisible walls where they're aren't supposed to be, and where the camera goes crazy. These are most abundant on the pollinating/flying levels, which get disorienting. So, including everything I said, I will put the gameplay at a solid 6.
Okay, now that I'm done with the actual gameplay, I'll move on to the presentation. If I didn't know that this was a 360 game I would've thought it was on the PS2. It has Wii graphics at best, and believe it or not, PS1 graphics at worse. There is nothing graphically impressive, but also nothing that's very terrible to look at. The game's story is pretty funny at times, but it's just because it taken from a funny movie. I usually skip the cutscenes since I haven't seen the whole movie, but in the scenes not straight from the movie, there are voices that sound like they are from the real actors. I don't know if the lines are taken from the movie, or if they were recorded just for the game, but they sound alright. The sound effects are very forgettable, as is the music whish repeats over, and over, and over, and over. So I'll give the presentation a 6.5.
This game sound very bad, but that's just because I pointed out the negatives for 99% of the review. It really isn't that bad. Yes, it has it's share of many problems, but I had fun with this game. It really is better than the sum of it's parts. It's not a game that you'll want to keep for over a month, and I won't recommend it to anyone over the age of 11, but that's not to say it isn't fun. If you have a young brother or sister that likes the movie, they'll most likely like the game. So, taking in consideration the design, gameplay, and presentation, I give the Bee Movie Game a 6 out of 10.