'Naughty Bear' isn't your average kiddies' saturday morning cartoon series - Heck no, it's 'Manhunt' meets 'Conkers'!
Yes indeed. Naughty Bear is based around a teddy with some attitude problems. In the lively island he lives in, he's always up to mischief, ready to interrupt any public events and just cause havoc for the sake of being naughty. There isn't really any fixed story to it - You're just a bear who finds killing people somewhat arousing.
Each episode features a fresh new idea and as the Naughty Bear, you must execute various other teddies as instructed. Some of the events involve you having to kill bears running for mayors, and part of the manifesto includes "exterminating Naughty". Yep, the island hates him to bits, but perhaps thats why Naughty is motivated to destroy all these A-holes.
I completely finished the game within 9 or so hours. The game can easily be finished in 5-6 hours if you get around the camera issues and somewhat clunky controls when it comes to the stealthy side of the game. Yeah - you get the freedom to use stealth or just walk up and beat the crap out of your targets. I used both methods. Although stealthy can be more brutal, and often remind you of the execution scenes in games like Manhunt, its also satisfying to clobber the fluff out of the other goody teddies.
Graphically, the game looks like a mixture of bland and cute. The blandness gives it a cute look. It's hard to explain. The environments, such as the jungle-like areas look quite smooth, and pretty much everything you'd expect to see from a 3D animated kids show, but for a game, it can be quite disappointing. The interior designs and cutscenes are usually good looking, the character models dont really show much variation in terms of AI (which by the way is so dumb, it makes the whole island feel like a land full of retarded individuals), and the levels follow the same concept of find the target and initialize an attack on them, whether it involves you killing them or just injuring them. To be honest, the graphics are passable at best.
Some missions might strike a sense of de ja vu into your heads. The reason why is because such moments were inspired of classic films. The teddy-fish missions is based on "Jaws", and one bit is inspired from the horror flick "The Shining". There are more cheeky references to other films so thats a positive aspect of the game.
What makes the game quite easy to proceed through is how your foes never actually put up a fight. They just stand there and take it, which takes away too much from the "difficulty" aspect. I'd appreciate it if the creators actually added some coppers who would show up with machine guns and totally ice you on the spot. It would make the game feel more tense, and the inclusion of hunters to the game would make the gamer feel more paranoid. However, I'm not saying the game is hard, for those of you who have played games such as Ninja Gaiden, you will face the same level of difficulty here since as you go on, the enemies do start to retaliate, and the public also grow more aware of your crimes, and will most likely do all they can to stop you from initiating your reign of terror upon the island.
In terms of presentation, everything tends to look as cute as possible. The menu screens are wonderful, in fact, I often take a break from the brutal aspects of the game, just to pop into the menu mode to flick around the different options to enjoy how they fluently transide and make some great clicky noises.
The environment contains a number of typical areas. All the basic places you'd expect in an open world is present here so you will constantly visit these areas.
The roster of weapons are sweet. The golf clubs, baseball bats, knives and so on are really cool to use. They offer some great sound effects when used, but the best thing is when you actually kill your enemies, a little animated usually follows, transforming a would-be cute bear into a homicidal psycho.
Going back to the AI, at first I thought it was gonna be a peace of cake but I was wrong. The AI is so crappy, in my opinion, the rest of the bear community are so brain-dead, they throw some attacks which are obviously classified as 'suicide attempts'. Yep - the difficulty gets increasingly hard about an hour or two into this epic adventure.
Now, you're probably wondering why I gave this game a 6.5 when I clearly say I am enjoying it. Well - the game had a lot of potential as far as I am concerned. I really dont know who the target audience were but one thing for sure is that I felt that they forced it to have aspects from all the different genres explored in various other games, which cramped the style of the game. It just tried to fit everything in that it felt like an obscure cocktail of various other genres - and eventually you'd feel "crapped" off by how the game constantly forces you to follow certain stuff.
On the whole, Naughty Bear is worth checking out, and I'm fortunate enough to get my copy 4 weeks before the actual release (due to my mate working at 505 Games offering me a copy). The price is also a bit heavy "fur" such a game. I'd probably purchase this game when it hits the bargain bins. In fact, only buy the game if its 20 bucks. I got mine free and so far like it since its a style not seen often, and probably the first of the kind to hit the next-gen consoles but like I mentioned beforem, there are a hefty amount of flaws in this game. It's playable, its cute, its fun. Naughty Bear is a venture you probably dont wanna miss but once again - only go for it if your fine with facing the consequences I have noted above in my review.
So keep cuddling (or killing) till I come back with my next awesome review!!